


The coming storm is gonna be a crazy ride

by twistedingenue



Series: The Coming Storm [1]
Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: Complete, F/M, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Women Being Awesome, gratuitous social media references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-05
Updated: 2012-07-10
Packaged: 2017-11-09 05:00:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/451573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedingenue/pseuds/twistedingenue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy manages to actually graduate, and things go downhill from there. There being crossing the stage. That's when it starts sucking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I kind of refer to this as the fic that ate my brain and my work productivity.

 

The first time Dr Foster was relocated, SHIELD considered it a good idea to move anyone else associated with her project as well. So Darcy went with her. New Mexico was getting hot and boring, and when she finally learned why she was being moved, she was more than okay with it. Same with the second move to Chicago and a setup in Fermilab. She saw buffalo herds and went hiking and all was pretty good.

After the third time, she was told just go back to school and finish up her degree, and that separation probably would help her not to be a target herself. School is quiet, although she can occasionally see a uniform here and there, and her advisor is legitimately freaked out of his mind when she turns in her internship assignment and half of it is blacked out as classified.

“They just do not pay me enough to read both astrophysics and Nordic Gods in the same paper, Darcy, and that’s just what I am allowed to read,” he says before reviewing her schedule for her last semester, approving her override for International Conflicts and Security. She thinks that after her internship, she should take a break from inter-realm conflicts and focus on the ones on this planet instead.

Darcy’s only regret is that her ipod was returned wiped.

                                                                                             *

Jane keeps in touch, of course, because they had bonded over the internship into something more than a mentor-thing, but less than BFF’s. She’s moved a few more times before Tony and Dr Selvig gang up on her and move her into the Tower and one of the labs is given over to her use.

“How’s the roof?” Darcy asks. Her priorities are totally in place. Jane can’t think without a good roof. She also can’t go pretend she can see Thor in the night sky without a good roof.

“They tell me it’s a magnificent view, but I can’t see anything useful,” Jane says over Skype three weeks before graduation, “Tony Stark is ruining my life. His tower puts off too much light. But he offered to do your Commencement Address, right until Pepper got this little eyebrow arch going and said something about his last speech at MIT and he choked on his whiskey.” Jane talks about the Avengers like friends, or at the very least people who aren’t getting in the way of her research and it’s a little disconcerting that she’s on a first name basis with fucking Iron Man. Then again, Jane’ also s dating the Norse God of Thunder after hitting him with a car and that’s still not the weirdest part of her life.

Jane comes to Darcy’s graduation, bearing Captain America’s congratulations, which startles Darcy just a little bit, because they have never met (because, hello, it’s Captain America. Normal people don’t just get random messages from superheroes. But apparently, Darcy isn’t normal anymore) and Jane doesn’t talk about him that much. “He hasn’t quite realized that college these days for most people is a sleep away camp with even more beer and sex. It’s a big deal to him.”

“I’m sure he’ll get over it when I’m still unemployed in six months,” Darcy’s cap is crooked, but she’s got a magna cum laude stole and is so far resisting the urge to turn it into a headband or something. Because she’s an adult now.

Jane also comes with a small complement of agents, but apparently they are like, junior agents in fucking training or something because Darcy remembers walking on the stage and then comes to in a cramped cell. It’s not even tall enough to stand up in as she finds out when she reopens her head wound she apparently obtained earlier. She sits back down to apply pressure before the rest of her is covered in blood. Her head hurts and the lack of coffee is also pressing behind her eyes, and she struggles to get her bearings straight. She’s not wearing her gown anymore, but she’s wearing the green dress and leggings she was wearing underneath it, which are all in pretty much one piece.  She really could have used that stole though to put pressure on her head.

As the bleeding subsides, she takes stock of the cell. There’s light, and actually plenty of it from a ceiling panel, an empty bucket in the right corner — ew, and on her left are two plastic bottles of water and a protein bar.  The walls are solid, and the door has a single small panel that doesn’t look like it opens from her side. There’s not much noise from outside of the walls, but there is some, and it’s obviously human movement. But otherwise, she’s completely alone.

She opens the water, drinks some of it — SHIELD gave her some survival training after the first safe house was compromised, and she knows to conserve whatever she can, but she uses a little more to flush the dirt out of her obvious wounds. 

Darcy tells herself that all she has to do is be where she is, just like as if she got lost at the mall as a kid. Stay in one place, which isn’t really a problem, cause it doesn’t seem like anyone is coming to threaten or torture her. She can’t tell how long she’s been held, and can’t really tell how time is passing. The light never goes out and it’s relentlessly bright. She gets water every so often, and she’s had to use the fucking bucket a couple of times, and another protein bar appears a little less often than the water. Darcy mostly sleeps on and off, since the light is messing with her and sips the water. When she can’t, she sings. Sometimes to herself, sometimes loudly. During a particularly boisterous Justin Beiber session she hears a thump against the cell wall and someone yells at her. At least she knows she’s not being left completely alone. She switches to Somewhere Over the Rainbow that she can’t really bellow.

She knows by now that it’s had to have been days with very little to eat, but hey, she can’t really do anything other than sit in the small, bright cell when she hears a tapping sound from the light fixture and it goes out. She crawls to the back left corner as the light crashes to the ground and a head pops out.

“Darcy Lewis?” a cool, low female voice asks, “I hope you don’t have any problems with small spaces.”

“I’ll manage,” Darcy says, crawling back to the center and she stands upright and is helped into an even tighter air duct.

“Good, follow me and stay low and quiet.”

The ducts are pitch black and Darcy can faintly hear gunfire below her as the ducts slope upwards. The agent, Darcy really hope she’s following an agent, otherwise this is the weirdest interrogation scene ever, barely makes a noise as she moves through the space. Darcy bumps into the walls every few feet, so she’s not terribly surprised when a knife is pulled out and she turns towards Darcy. Her breath hitches for a second before the woman punches through the vent, letting a little light in, then kicks through a ceiling panel below. “Widow to Hawkeye. I have the package, delivering to you for safe keeping,” she says, and then looks straight at Darcy, “We should be on the top floor now. Once you jump down, there will be a door to your right. It has a ladder leading up to a maintenance shed on the roof.  There will be a man with a bow nearby. Get to the floor and stay close to him. Trust me when I say that he is the safest person for you to be around.”

“Okay,” is all Darcy can really say. She slips down through the panels and follows Widows instructions. The ladder is easily scalable for a person who hasn’t been confined to a seated position or worse for an indeterminate amount of time, and she struggles to get her muscles moving in sync with each other. She groans as she opens the door to the outside and steps through. Before she can drop, she hears a low, “Hawkeye to Widow, package received. Rendezvous in 5 minutes.”

“Oh, “ she says as she hits the ground, eyes adjusting to the little light just before dawn, “I rate the A-team?” She crawls for hopefully the last damn time over to Hawkeye. He looks down at her, his bow half-drawn in front of him.

“Just a few more minutes, kid. Ride’s almost here.”  He goes back to scanning the sky.

Darcy can hear the helicopter coming before she sees it, and sees Widow before she ever hears her. The agents fuss for a second, “Got it?” “Flash drive. Somebody left their computer unlocked.” She’s not quite hearing them as if they were far away, but her mind is watching the helicopter land on the roof and doesn’t register that Hawkeye is lifting her off the ground. She feels him running and then is handed off to someone inside of the copter.

Its a few minutes later, after taking off and everyone is settled that she is able to ask, “Jane?”

Widow responds, “Was never touched.”

“How long?”

“You went missing a week and a half ago. Barton,” she starts, but Hawkeye is already there with a medical kit, “yes, that. You’re safe with us Darcy.”

Darcy slips back into comfortable stillness, and just keeps breathing as two sets of hands check over her. She feels the sting of an antiseptic washing over her head, before she falls asleep.

 

                                                                                 *

This time when she wakes up, she’s in a warm, if not entirely comfortable cot in SHIELD medical with a fluid IV stuck in her, and Jane hovering over her.

“Please tell me I at least walked off the stage with my diploma placeholder before I was kidnapped?” Darcy asks, “Because I really can’t remember”

“It was more like running for cover with your placeholder diploma. You shook your dean’s hand and then there was shooting. They got me into a car too fast for me to see what happened to you, Darce, although the footage on youtube shows you elbowing one thug in the eye socket. So, good job. The agents with me said that I was the target, but you were a very good backup. Natasha recovered the data they were going to have me process for them. I’m not entirely certain what it is yet, but it was AIM that got you.”  Jane’s voice is warm, and a little far off, and Darcy can tell that her mind is already wandering to the data, “When they realized they got a lab assistant who is more comfortable in the arts part of Arts and Sciences,”

“Naysayer,” Darcy objects half-heartedly.

“They tried to use your well-being to get more scientific data from us.” Jane looks down at Darcy, “We were always going to find you, but they got you out and off the grid faster than SHIELD thinks should be possible.”

“Whoever grabbed me is just lucky that I couldn’t get the taser underneath my gown.” Jane’s starting to look at her with sad puppy eyes, ones that she’s had to have learned from Thor because they were not that good in New Mexico. “I like my taser,” Darcy babbles, “and it’s never leaving my side again.”

Doctors make it in after that, and Darcy learns that she’s malnourished and dehydrated and had a concussion approximately the size of her coffee addiction, all things that she could have told them had she been awake when she was brought in. They want to keep her for a day or so before moving her, just to make sure her vitals get back to normal.  Jane comes and goes the next day, obviously distracted by her work, but keeps the conversation light and only a little physics-centric.

Widow visits once, introducing herself as Natasha. She stays near the door, but chats for a few minutes before Darcy thanks her for getting her out of there. Natasha nods, turns and leaves.

“When did this become my life?” she asks herself when she thinks she’s alone. Her brain is putting together more and more of the week, and Darcy is pleased to find that she spent so much of it sleeping and trying to annoy the crap out of the people who were holding her by singing Baby. But she also finds she can remember gunshots and pain, and a small bright cell and her spine curving over her body.

“I believe that started when Jane ran Thor over and you tased him. Everything else followed a natural progression of fucked up,” Hawkeye says from the door. Unlike his partner, he walks all the way in, grabbing a chair and turning it around to sit, “I’m kinda supposed to tell you what happens next. For the time being, you are being moved into the Tower and a small ‘we’re sorry you got kidnapped’ stipend. Whether the move is permanent or not depends on whatever you decide to do.”

“I’m supposed to be safer in the Tower that is damaged on a fairly regular basis?”

“For certain amounts of safer,” he smirks, “SHIELD just wants to keep you in its grasp. We could just offer you up as professional bait. That could be a fun job.”

“I’ll pass on that. Although, maybe I could write a travelers guide to prison cells. I rate mine as a two-star. Had all the amenities, but very low ceilings.”

“You had a bucket, that gives it at least a three-star. You don’t want to see a one-star. You’ll be given an apartment in the tower, nothing fancy. You’ll have to figure out something to do, but Dr Foster expressed an interest in some more unpaid labor. We got your studio packed up and moved already. We’re hoping this will be temporary, but we misjudged that the interest in Dr Foster had tempered, and as long as she’s a target, so are you. We’ve already displayed that you are important and the footage is all over the internet,” he says in a quiet voice, just loud enough for her to hear, but it’s direct. Jane’s been treating her too delicately and talks a little around her and the directness is a pleasant change. “You are a youtube sensation, actually. AIM went for the grab just as you walked and at least one video made the rounds that keeps you in frame.”

“But I thought I wasn’t the target. Why did it start when I walked?”

“You weren’t the main target, but you were identified already as one. SHIELD got Jane safe in seconds, but we didn’t have anyone near you. You took down a guy with your elbow, and that’s where the youtube footage stopped,” he pauses, “well, for the public. The rest of the footage has them throwing you to the ground then dragging you off. We kept that off of the media, mostly, except for the few people coherent enough to see you taken out.”

“Poor Jeremy Liu,” Darcy deadpans, “Never got to walk, did he?”

Barton snorts, “You’re going to be alright kid.” He stands up from the chair, starting to leave.

“Wait. I caught your codename but not your actual name.”

“It’s Clint,” he says, walking out the door with a little wave.

“Thank you!” Darcy calls out after him and takes a long look at his butt, “Come around any time!”

                                                                                 *

The apartment they move her to does not seem like it should be a city apartment. It’s just a one-bedroom, but it’s nicely laid out and the bathroom is roughly the size of her freshman dorm. She’d always heard that New York City apartments were shoeboxes but this was more than comfortable, this was a kind of killer pad for a first out of college place. She unpacked her things, ordered groceries, and bought a new used couch off of craigslist, enlisted a couple of agents (the ones that were guarding Jane at graduation) to deliver it for her and settled.

She didn’t move much off the couch for a couple of days; enjoying blankets, Pop-tarts and her Netflix queue. Freedom rocked and she doesn’t dream. She figures eventually that’ll be worrisome, but right now, she can’t bring herself to care.


	2. Chapter 2

 

Darcy finishes her couch and Pop-Tart party by putting on actual clothing and heading to Jane’s lab. The lab is over a dozen floors down, and the elevator is excruciating for the enclosed space. Darcy takes deep breaths and tells herself that she is going to get a killer workout by taking the stairs every time. Stark has quick elevators at least and she only needs to take a moment to regain composure before entering the lab.

“Whoa, this is a way better set-up than anything we had before. Did you even have to make any of this equipment out of sheet metal and dollar store magnets?”

“Oh good, you made it back. Here,” Jane says, depositing a large stack of paperwork in Darcy’s arms and then giving her a quick hug, “Can you…make those right? Like, well…”

“What needs to be highlighted?” Darcy asks, manipulating the papers so that they are all facing the same direction at least.

“On the printouts I need you to highlight the values over 90 in the …never mind, let me just write you down the words. I don’t need to tell you the science.”

“It’s good that we can go right back to where we left off after my time of crisis,” Darcy mutters, cleaning off a workspace and finding a highlighter next to the coffee maker. Jane has a habit of leaving whatever writing utensil she was using there whenever she refilled her cup. The pile was epic back in New Mexico and Darcy had more than once made office supply towers. Jane deposits a post it note with the requested information, and Darcy slips on her headphones and goes to work.

“Hey Jane! Is this number supposed to be this high? It’s labeled,” she pauses, “Spatial Atmo Dist Mag? It’s way higher than anything else.”

Jane comes over to look at the printout, “And this is why I prefer the human touch. Tony Stark can suck it.” Jane grabs the paper from Darcy, “Keep going, but now add this,” she writes down a second, higher number, “Any reading higher than this needs to be highlighted in a different color.”

“What am I looking at here? Explain it like I’m five.”

“From what Thor said before he escorted Loki back home, the Bifrost is mending, but there is no telling how long that is going to take. Until it’s finished, it takes a lot of effort and energy to traverse the realms. I’m looking for what’s fixing it, so that maybe we can make it go faster.”

“And this data?” She sees Jane biting her lower lip and shifting from side to side, “It’s from AIM, isn’t it?”

“I think they are related.”

“If only they had said something. I would have much preferred paper pushing to the cell. Or at least, paper pushing in the cell.” She starts lightly laughing, and Jane joins in, at first a chuckle and then snorts and Darcy keeps laughing at that.

Jane and Darcy work together more comfortably after that. Dr Selvig comes in for a little bit, and Jane goes into the full Dr Foster mode with him. It doesn’t make much sense, so Darcy slips out to find the good coffee, rather than whatever Jane found in bulk. She climbs the stairs a few floors — the lab areas have maps that highlight the Keurigs, and settles with a cup in a break room. Over the next few days, right up until Friday hits, she works for a few hours and escapes to a good coffee machine. She talks to whoever comes in the break room, and she meets Dr Banner (“It’s okay to call me Bruce”) who says his lab is on this floor. She does a little work for him too, when Jane is lost in thought and doesn’t give direction. Bruce is polite, a little sarcastic and reserved, which makes total and utter sense when she puts two and two together to make The Hulk. She pulls together his actual paperwork and requisitions for him.

Jane wanders down, having looked up and realizing that her lab assistant had disappeared. She and Bruce science it up for a few minutes before Darcy’s brain to mouth filter fails and says, “Wow, I haven’t been outside since graduation. Am I allowed outside?”

“Of course you are hon, you wanna head up to the roof for right now?” Jane asks.

The prospect of either all those stairs or the elevator is terrifying, “Nah. Just…didn’t realize it. This tower is sort of like an Arco from SimCity. Provides for all our needs.”

Bruce smirks, “I used to love destroying cities in that game.” Both Jane and Darcy look a little askew at him, “I don’t enjoy doing it now. It’s just part of the job.”

                                                                                   *

It’s still like a summer vacation, so when she’s rudely awakened at the crack of 11:30 by a knock at the door, she considers just turning over and ignoring it to go back to sleep. But then she starts hearing the lock turn anyways; she pulls off the covers and heads to the door with a yell. She gets to the door as it opens at the same time.

“Uh, hi,” Clint says.

“Did you just jimmie my lock open?” It’s a stupid question, because of course he did, “Never mind. What do you want?”

He smiles, “Lunch and a walk? Someone may have mentioned that you haven’t seen New York from the ground yet. I think it’s more impressive up here, but what do I know?”

Darcy stammers for a moment, but Clint gives her a look of exasperation, “Fine, give me twenty minutes. I hear that you know how to wait patiently.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She gets through her quick shower without an issue but her mind starts racing as she figures out what to do with her wet hair (loose braid, she’ll dry it later) and what to wear (her floordrobe hasn’t had a chance to develop yet and everything is actually put away) and she doesn’t realize she muttering until she’s back in the living room where Clint is watching her curiously. He doesn’t say anything, just stands up and motions her out first. She grabs her purse, with her fucking taser, and leads the way towards the stairwell.

“Kid, I already got my butt kicked by Natasha this morning, I don’t need fifty flights of stairs.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“In the elevator, come on.”

Darcy relents and closes her eyes after they walk in and the doors close in front of them. She squeaks and her breath hitches as they start moving. She hears Clint’s soft chuckle mixed with a sigh and feels warm hands on her shoulders.

“It’s alright. You’re okay. It’s a small space but there’s at least two ways out that I could do right now. Take a deep breath,” he lifts the hand on her right shoulder and she can feel his body leaning over her. She hears a soft tapping and then the hand is back, but he’s still as close “Just feel my hands, feel the pressure. Focus on that. I have a code that fast tracks the elevator. We won’t make any unscheduled stops.”

Darcy evens out her breathing. Clint’s hands are warm, rough and very strong. She keeps her eyes closed, but lets them relax, “I’m…”

“We can talk after we are out. And I won’t say a word to anyone else if you want. Just keep breathing, halfway there. You can hear my voice and you know that whatever happens, I can get you out of here. It’s only temporary.”

They stand like that, and his slip down from the tops of her shoulders to the sides of her arms, She feels the them stop and opens her eyes to see that they are at ground floor, but the door hasn’t opened yet. She twists a little to look Barton straight in the eye.

“I got to enter the code,” he drops both hands and steps to the side to lean this time to press the sequence. The doors open and Darcy steps out in two big steps. Clint directs her out through the lobby and out a side door. The scaffolding that ran along the sidewalk crowded them out. Almost every building had damage to be fixed, and when there wasn’t structural damage there were windows boarded up.

They walked side by side for a few minutes before Barton spoke, just loud enough to be heard, “A few years ago, I was trapped in an air duct after an explosion. I was in there for three days, with just enough room to stay lying down. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again. But that time? I got back to base, swung up into the ducts during training and just froze. Couldn’t help it. Natasha helped me down.”

“You don’t seem the type to get flustered by small spaces.” Darcy said, trying to keep her voice quiet.

“I’m not, and whatever was left after being a kid was trained out of me pretty quickly. You don’t always know what’s going to take root though.  Natasha never said a word to our handler and we trained it back out of me, and over time it actually went away.”

“Can I get that code you used?”

“No. Hey, in here. Sandwiches.” He leads her into a small shop. Darcy orders turkey, Clint some monstrosity that’s easily two inches thicker than her own, and then orders a fruit salad as well. He sees her facial expression and says, “Hey, I’m a growing boy. And I train like, half the day. You should see what Steve eats. Or worse, Bruce after the other guy.”

“Thor ate a box of Pop-Tarts and then we went out for breakfast.”

“See, you are a fountain of information. Things we can use when we get him back. How’s that going?”

Darcy has been deconstructing data from both AIM and Jane’s readings, and tells him that it’s still very much in the air, theory wise. Promising avenues and concepts but nothing that can be done yet. Truth of it is, Jane doesn’t really have any idea what’s going on, but a lot of really cool guesses. Clint mentions that he sees her on the roof most nights, just staring up.

“Oh that’s normal,” Darcy says between bites, “the gazing. If you ever see her head fall over to the left side, and her right hand comes up, get out of the way. She’s having an idea. Oh! Ding, subject change. Am I allowed to leave the tower? By myself I mean, you aren’t always going to come drag me away.”

Clint digs in his pockets and pulls out a keychain and shows it to her. It’s simple; two thin pieces of metal, top and bottom to a button, “Panic button with GPS. It stays on your person at all times. You press that button, and your location is sent to headquarters and whatever the local police force. Military depending on where you are. Give me your phone…” she pulls it out of her pocket and hands it over. Barton starts typing away at it, “this is the security line, if you ever don’t feel safe, or you see something suspicious.” He keeps playing with her phone for a minute longer and gives it back. She scrolls through her contacts and sees that he put the number in under Safety and Support Helpline, nothing that would stand out if someone else got the phone.

“Also, kid, your taste in games is horrible. Do you actually play Avenger Mania?”

“It’s a great time-waster. Plus the trivia section is hilarious, and the cartoon representations in “Match the hero to their weapon’ mini-game is straight up adorable. You are totes cute pulling the strings on a cupid sized bow. Wanna see?”

“I’ll trust you on that. No wait, I gotta see what Stark’s suit looks like.” Darcy opens the app and turns it around to show him. He barks out a laugh. The little Iron Man runs around the screen being chased by a small Pepper Potts, “They even got her heels right. That woman runs better on stilettos than I can…”

“You run in stilettos often?” Darcy interrupts.

“Only when the job requires it. I should practice more.” Clint stands up and grabs Darcy’s trash and throws it away from where he stands. Darcy snorts, but stands to leave too and they walk out together. He holds her shoulders again in the elevator, but she finds it wasn’t as hard as it was just an hour earlier.

                                                                                            *

Monday morning, Darcy is not entirely surprised to see that everyone’s wallpaper has been switched to a still from the animation, and better yet, their screensaver is entirely animated. She’s more surprised that a second number was added to her contacts, listed under cb.

                                                                                            *

She’s still an unpaid lab assistant, and that so totally doesn’t pay back student loans, so she takes a day off and spends it writing and rewriting her resume. It’s not the worlds most stellar piece of fiction, but there are more truths than lies, and figuring out what to put for her internship from outer space is a challenge (she runs it through legal, just like she did her paper, but this time, no blacked out parts) but it comes out looking like she’s a fucking adult with prospects. Strange ones, though. Because her work experience goes from researcher/fact checker for the college radio station to internship with Dr Jane Foster, (Particle Physics, Culver University/ SHIELD), and the summer she spent delivering documents for her uncle’s law firm.

She papers the city looking for work. But the city isn’t terribly kind to those just coming out of college, or really anyone that doesn’t work construction. She texts Clint, **I missed my calling. Should have gone into roofing.** She gets an interview here and there, one even at the UN, which she thinks must be the work of her advisor, because there’s no way she should ever be in the running for something with an actual title. Nothing much comes of it except a couple of shopping trips for professional clothing.

Of course, in the middle of the UN interview, they are placed on lockdown when they get word that there is a raid in progress at some nearby institute, which the Avengers are handling. They try to continue the interview, but the lump in Darcy’s throat is thick and she’s not able to say very much, and the interview isn’t rescheduled.

“It’s their loss,” says Jane over coffee in the lab that afternoon, “You are an excellent minion and national treasure.”

“Damn straight,” Darcy responds, “I am a flunky of the highest order.”

“No coffee better tasting than from the perfect hands of Miss Darcy Lewis,” announces Hawkeye, and he’s clearly Hawkeye because hey, uniform, just as the man next to him is, fuck, sweet tits that’s Captain America. Who is blushing, “Darcy, you said the soft part loud again.”

“Oh crap,” she says, in a small voice.

“That part you could have said loud.”

Jane is unflustered by both Darcy and costumed superheroes and just asks, “What brings you boys down here so soon?”

Captain ever-loving America holds out a flash drive, “We recovered this at the raid. More AIM data for you. Tony took a look at it and said there might be something new in there that you might find interesting. I confess I couldn’t tell you what it is.”

“I myself get kind of a headache whenever Tony tries to explain why something is interesting,” Hawkeye says, “Darcy did a halfway decent job explaining it in a little more detail than ‘repairing the Bifrost’.”

“Again, flunky of the highest order! I am the chief nerd-herder around these parts,” she smirks in response.

“Tony also asked if you had, and I repeat, the numbers for that thing we talked about five days ago when Pepper was trying to make me get in the car to go to the Board of Directors meeting.”

Jane knits her eyebrows for a second, then points to a pile of papers, “He wants the mag numbers. I think they are there.”

Captain America goes to look at the pile, lifting up the first few sheets, “No, I think this is Darcy’s.”

She stands up and walks over, still wearing her heels and pencil skirt from her interview, “Sorry, I threw my stuff there after that crapshoot of an interview.” Barton whistles at her, “I should have worn flats.  Easier to evacuate to basements in flats.”

“No, no, wear heels, kid. Whenever you’d like. All the time.”

Cap’s expression changes as he reads through the resume in his hands, “Your undergrad thesis was on scientific relations and current international conflicts?”

“Well, it was going to be interplanetary, or whatever, but I decided to limit the scope once I learned I had to present it. My class was not ready to understand any of what happened. No matter what they think.” She picks through the rest of papers, and pulls out a small stack, “These are the numbers on atmospheric magnets or whatever that Tony is interested in. What, I listen. That’s when you told me that Tony could suck it.”

“Thank you Miss Lewis, Dr Foster” Cap says with good humor, “We’ve got to get to the last debrief.”

“I am so telling Stark to suck it from Jane. He’ll enjoy that. I enjoy that. Natasha will raise her eyebrow in enjoyment,” Clint says as they walk back out.

Jane tells Darcy to take the rest of the night off, that they can work the data together the next day. Instead, they head up to the roof (Darcy closes her eyes still in the elevator, each time and can feel weight along her shoulders and back but its getting easier) with ice cream, beer and blankets, talk of increasingly stupid things and end up singing power ballads into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the great response! The story is pretty much complete, and I am planning to post daily until all seven parts are up. 
> 
> ...now I just need to go write that seventh part. So much for my work productivity.


	3. Chapter 3

 

SHIELD comes to Darcy with a job offer three days later. It’s a suitably entry-level position, Assistant Science Liaison, but it’s a job with a desk and three half-walls, and a salary and benefits. It’s as glorious as it gets, and the commute really can’t be beat. The current person who has to manage the science department is a scientist and tends to forget that the rest of SHIELD has forgotten more about science than they remember or internalized, and has been having to field far too many questions from Agents than he has time for, and Darcy speaks nerd better than most people.

**Did Captain America get me a job?**

**He has this thing about helping the little guy get ahead. Also, you have tremendous talents**

**Thank you, Clint. That was surprising sweet**

**And you are pretty capable person too**

**Oh a tit joke. There’s the ass I’ve come to respect and admire**

She writes Steve a thank you note on actual stationary. She thinks it’s old-fashioned, which means he’ll probably appreciate it more than the joke ecards she usually sends out.

The job solidifies in to writing lots of memos and reports on the day-to-day operations and weekly findings of the various science labs, and to the various levels of clearances. She can’t report on the highest levels, but she’s working on pretty much everything else. It also means her days are spent going between all the labs, because she knows scientists can’t be trusted to submit paperwork on time. Except for Dr Banner, who is meticulous in details and punctual beyond all others. The Shared Sciences division is a workload meant for a second assistant, a few dozen scientists sharing lab space and projects, some working support roles for the Jane, Dr Banner, and Tony, but most working straightforwardly for SHIELD and their developments, or Stark Industries and his developments.

It takes Darcy three weeks to figure out that the best way to get Tony to do paperwork is to have Pepper slip it in on his calendar under the heading: Do this or the coffee budget will be cut to Folgers. It takes another week before Tony starts to acknowledge her presence in his workshop, but once she learns that he likes the sarcasm and likes it better when she turns an utterly filthy array of language on in his presence after she walks in on an afternoon tryst. It’s a wonder Pepper still seems to like her, really.  She tells Jane that the deadline is a day earlier than everyone else, and she acts like her sophomore year homeroom teacher down in the shared labs, leveling a glare of such aching disapproval at the minions who decided not to turn in their permission slips.

On occasion, Pepper makes Tony get out of the workshop and take Darcy, Jane and Bruce out to lunch to work on some science together. He frequents this lovely cafe with outside seating on nice, not so windy days, and Darcy listens and writes notes down to turn into supplementary reports. She also argues with Tony on the subtleties and strategies of Storage Wars. He bemoans being forced out with “Scruffles, Stacked and Skinny” but engages with every point, and humors Darcy when she asks again to, “Explain it like I’m five. No, not like you at five. Me at five.”

She coordinates her findings with the liaison from the helicarrier, which is so utter badass that she sometimes wishes they could trade places. But Cory Thomas is also a jerk who won’t share his memo templates, and she has to make new ones herself, and she doesn’t want Cory to have any of the fun stuff she gets to mess with on a regular basis.

The reports to her supervisor are long, involved pieces of work, taking up most of a day to write, but as she goes down the clearances, they get quicker and easier. The lowest levels basically get a small paragraph in what amounts to a company newsletter, but the Avengers quickly become her favorite group to write for because she is now, in her own words, “The Queen of Bullet Points,” although she revises that shortly afterwards to be Queen of (written) Bullet Points, because Natasha gets a weird little glare in her eye about bullets.

**She likes them.**

**Likes them, or….likes them?**

**I wouldn’t advise stealing the bullets out of her dresser in an emergency. Unless it’s a sex emergency.**

**Real or vibrating?**

**CLINT? YOU CAN’T LEAVE ME HANGING LIKE THIS!**

She becomes really great at just explaining the science in bullet points for the varied intellects of the Avengers. No one of course, is stupid, but the range is staggering even if the beginning is above average, as is the points of context. So she goes for dry sarcasm, which appears to be the unifying language of all the members.

And almost daily, she works at small spaces, taking the elevator (sometimes the public, sometimes the staff) up to the roof. She never goes at a particular time, and she mostly just sits and watches the construction for a little while. Jane joins her when she goes at night and they count starts and recount the day, and miss Thor together. She meets others up there during the day — she finds Steve and his sketchbook, and she mostly lets him be as he draws out an unfamiliar skyline. But sometimes, she sits with him and she plays him new music and fills him in on history. Clint joins her from time to time, but he’s been sent out on missions with Natasha lately. Darcy doesn’t get much of what they entail, but he tells her the bare bones, that they’ve been going in and out of research stations and companies that they’ve identified as potential targets for AIM’s hack and slash approach to finding data setting up snares and traps, both in code and in the physical sense.

Darcy isn’t allowed to know much about the ops, but Clint sends a picture of him and Natasha in crisp, perfect business attire, despite that it’s timestamped in the late evening.  They hardly look like themselves, which she supposes is a good trait in spies.

“Darcy!” Jane calls out on a Friday afternoon, actually making it to Darcy’s desk instead shooting an email or inter-office im, or whatever fancy getup they are trying out that week, “Darcy! I think I may have something!” Jane needs someone to talk at, and Darcy is the best qualified for that. Jane is pulling her out of her chair and down to her lab, letting Darcy take the stairs but hurrying her all the same.

“I spent too long trying to rectify the two datasets. They aren’t trying to do the same thing, but I used their data to isolate the particles that make up the Bifrost. I’m going to have to write papers, it’s entirely new!” This isn’t Jane babbling, it’s much worse, it’s just Jane making her logic skip around, “But I found the particle and I’ve been watching the rate of progress. Thor said while he was here that the Bifrost was mending itself, but that it would take time.”

“And you don’t want to wait that long to get laid.”

“Certainly not! But since I know what it is made of now, I just need to accelerate the progress. Tony… where’s Stark when you need him? He can help me figure this out, build the machine. I hate building machines, it’s just better when I do it rather than the big labs.”

Jane never looks more beautiful, more alive than when she is in the midst of discovery. She also never looks more crazy. Tony has somehow sensed that science needs to be done and enters while Jane is giving Darcy the rundown and instructions as she conducts an experiment.

“Sit there, and tell me if this reading dips below 200 ppm. Tony, I need fabrication!” and she’s off, as if Darcy had never stopped being her intern. Jane starts up her model, and Darcy watches a monitor, staying steady at 250 ppm. Jane doesn’t ever really tell her what she’s monitoring, but the moment it dips and she exclaims, she sees a glint of a rainbow forming in the testing area.

“I really think I have it,” Jane grins.

                                                                                            *

Tony has decided that the prospect of regaining Thor is, of itself, worthy of a party. That night. Right there in the Tower. In the Avengers living space. Where Darcy has never been and is now frantically deciding what to wear. Her inner Jane is going, “It’s just the Avengers. And Pepper. And maybe a scientist. They’ve all seen you in oversized sweaters and hats.” Her inner Pepper says, “But that’s no excuse to not look amazing.” But she goes with her inner Darcy and just decides that jeans and a comfy if a little slutty shirt that she hasn’t been able to wear because she’s been working damnit.

It’s not exactly the right call, because Jane never changed, Pepper is amazing, and Natasha just lets whatever constructed self she is shine right through her clothes, but Darcy doesn’t give a shit because the penthouse suite is amazing, and apparently an Avenger party is an excuse to drink whatever is passed to them, play epic games on the Wii and listen to about a dozen people’s playlists, including her own. It’s like what a dorm room party was supposed to be, except not disappointing. They toast to Jane, to Thor and to Pepper (she learns that Tony always toasts to Pepper. Always).

By about two in the morning, all of her guards are finally down, and she’s more than just a little wasted, and falls asleep with her head in Clint’s lap, “Just going to take a little nap before heading back to my room. Just stay being comfy, will you?” Clint snorts but doesn’t move. She doesn’t know how much later it is when she drifts back into consciousness a little, feeling another weight on the edge of the couch and soft voices talking to each other.

“Tasha, I am being careful, that’s why I’m not…”

“I’m not talking about hers, but yours. You’d break your own heart given half a chance.”

She feels rough, but warm fingers slide through her hair and draw circles on her neck, lulling her back to sleep.

                                                                          *

When she wakes up, she’s wrapped in a blanket on the couch, “Oh, so much for a little nap.” She sits herself upright, which may not have been the best idea, but it is step one to finding water. She starts to stand up when a plastic bottle lands next to her.

“Drink up buttercup. It’s a beautiful day.” Barton says, a shit-eating grin on his face, “And while all the little scientists have already gone to workshops and labs, it’s Saturday.”

“I swear I saw you drink almost an entire bottle of vodka last night. Why are you not like me?”

“Practice makes perfect, princess. Coffee?”

“Oh god yes, you are a wonderful man.”

“Great, let’s go!” The man is being chipper out of spite. Entirely spite.

“Isn’t there coffee here? I swear I saw coffee here,” Darcy does not whine, that wouldn’t be proper.

“It got a little….Starked this week and now no one can make it work except for him. So come on, coffee.”

Darcy grunts and accepts an outstretched hand.

 

She orders a coffee as black as her soul, and Clint gets something with mocha, she’s not paying that much attention. They sit quietly until she’s downed about half of hers and she feels human again. Clint fiddles with a straw, with sugar and creamer, like he’s figuring out what to say. Pulling out her phone, she says, “Have I got something to show you. Have you heard of tumblr?” Of course he hasn’t, so she delights in finding just the right tags to display its awesomeness. Jane’s also sent her a text message demanding coffee.

“So…” he drawls out, “a bunch of obsessed women —”

“Mostly teenagers.”

“Create artwork, gossip about us, and come up with insane theories about how we are sleeping with each other?”

“You all have epic romances. And entire tumblrs devoted to your asses. Mostly the epic romance falls between you and Natasha.” She doesn’t tell him about all the other epic romances, because while Clint would appreciate it, other Avengers might not.

She shows him “Hawkeye is feeling fabulous” and a series of gorgeous artwork with him and Natasha in black, white and red, the first has him sputtering in laughter, the second makes him quiet.

“Doesn’t even compare. That was, how would you put it? Such a failboaty idea,” he lofts, “But we are better as what we are. Friends, partners…”

“Loyal and true. Your hearts own companion.”

“No, not that one. One person can’t be everything to you. And that’s what she can’t be for me, can’t give me what I want.” He looks at the time on her phone, “I’ve got range time booked soon.”

“I’m going to grab the science bros a carafe real quick. I’ll catch up with you, okay?” Clint nods and they head off their separate ways.

It’s doesn’t take long, amazingly, to get a carafe and she can’t be more than a couple of minutes or so behind Barton and his Saturday morning strolling pace, which is lazier than fuck. Her walking speed is probably best described as a distracted bat out of hell when she’s trying to catch up. Darcy feels a tug on her purse and pulls it closer to her body. The carafe is knocked out of her hands and it spills over her shirt, falling to ground in a clatter. It’s not a terribly busy morning yet, and she’s pulled part of the way into an alleyway by the throat. “CLINT,” she yells before the hold around her neck becomes unbearable. Hopefully Barton’s hearing is as good as his sight. She feels herself being lifted off the ground. Her attacker is yelling something about her money, her purse, and she roots around in it, first feeling for the panic button and setting it off, and then for her taser. Her internal monologue lets her know just how terribly cliché this whole situation is as she can feel black settling around her eyes. She gives one last go of resistance, swinging her body off to the side and firing off the taser, hopefully into the fucker’s body.

The man yells and crumbles to the ground, bringing her with him. But his hold loosens, and she breaks free and coughs and gasps for air. She hears the unmistakable sound of running in boots as she’s rolling to all fours, looking up she sees Hawkeye. For a man that can look like whatever he needs to look like, Hawkeye is unmistakable in or out of uniform.

“Tried to mug me,” Darcy coughs out, her voice rough and gravelly. Turning her head, she gets her first real look at her attacker. He’s younger than she is, tall and broad, and all pale hair and skin. “It didn’t work.”

“I can see that. You okay kid?” He asks, pulling out his phone and finding a contact.

Darcy touches her throat and pinches her wet shirt, “Will be.”

Hawkeye gets whoever he needed, and gives instructions, “No, she’s safe and sound. Just send a squad car and a second agent to make the incident report and we will stop by medical afterwards.”

The attacker starts to stir and groans out, “What the fuck, bitch. I am going to tear your shit up for that.”

“That would be a bad idea,” Hawkeye says, unholstering his gun and pointing it straight at the kid, “You should just stay put.”

The second agent shows before a squad car, and while she looks like a rank and file agent, Darcy registers her as Natasha, “Everything under control?”

“Darcy brought down the lightening again.” They exchange a glance, and Natasha takes his place, holding out her pistol at the shaking kid.

“If you keep doing that, Thor’s going to get jealous. That’s his job.”

Darcy‘s moved herself to a sitting position, her head in her crossed arms, laying in her knees, softly sobbing, unable to really reply with any coherency.

“Hey, hey no need for that Darce. You’re safe. Everything worked the way it’s supposed to. You did great, sweetheart.” Hawkeye kneels down to her level, lifting up her head. Sirens approach — New York’s Finest have finally arrive, and he lifts her head, keeping her hair out of her eyes, “ You don’t want to constrict your airway right now, just in case, and it’ll hurt more.” He reaches out and snakes an arm around Darcy’s shoulders, cradling the back of her neck, and touches the side of her face. He hauls her up to standing and she curls herself up against his side and he wraps his arms around her.

“Adrenaline is such a bitch, Barton.”

“Been there, have the t-shirt collection.”

“Displayed proudly next to your back catalog of issues, circus freak.” Darcy wipes away her tears and works to compose herself.

Attacker-boy has been let-up and cuffed, after having what looks like a terrifying conversation with Natasha. He shakes more as he’s lead away to the squad car. She coolly assesses, “It is what she says, a mugging. No nefarious ulterior motives.”

One of the cops looks at the SHIELD agents and sighs, “I don’t suppose we can get a statement the normal way?”

Natasha steps in, “No. It will be made today and sent over. You okay to walk Darcy?”

“Yeah…I am never going to be nice and bring Stark coffee ever again.”

Natasha lifts part of her mouth in a smile, “That is usually a mistake. Stark doesn’t deserve nice things.”

                                                                          *

She’s given a thorough examination in medical, and while she’s probably going to have some nasty bruising in the next couple of days, from both being strangled and from falling on her attacker, but everything else seems to be fine. It hurts to talk, but she leads Natasha through her attack and lets her take photos for documentation. She feels double hung-over now, and more exhausted than she’s felt since being recovered from her first ordeal, so she goes home and sleeps.

She doesn’t stay asleep through the night and she goes looking for company. She has a hunch of where to find some, and rides the elevator up to the roof with a blanket. She meets Jane with a smile, and wraps the blanket around them both.

“Heard your day sucked.”

“Just an average New York mugging,” Darcy sighs, “Yours?”

“Well, I was supposed to get coffee…” they laugh together, “We’re going to New Mexico on Monday, pack your bags. I need you to drive the van.”

“Shouldn’t the Bifrost work from anywhere? It’s not like Thor and the others made regular trips to Puente Antiguo.”

“The bridge should build quicker from a recent end point.”

“So basically, the sooner it’s done, the sooner you can get your long awaited booty call. I hope he’s everything I remember.”

“Me too.”

Darcy happily chirps, “I bet he’s still as cut as ever.”

“Cheers to that!”

They chat amiably for a little while longer before Darcy leaves to get more sleep. Jane still stares up at the sky, but instead of her intense searching expression, she smiles.

                                                                                            *

Darcy watches with amusement as a mess of hands beat out a tournament of rock paper scissors.  Bruce, Clint and Natasha are fighting each other to be the last person to go to New Mexico. Tony made the equipment, Steve is there as team leader (as befitting Thor’s status) but they want a third to keep an eye on things. Barton wins the last round against Romanov, after something along the lines of best of 17 (they tie more often than not). He gives her an interesting look of disbelief, but grabs his quiver and bow case. Everyone’s suiting up except for Tony, who needs nimble fingers, but he’s got his suitcase with him, while Jane and Darcy finish loading up their equipment into the Quinjet and run a few last minute tests and calculations. Opening up a wormhole, a bridge, whatever may not be as safe as they hope and who knows what will fall out?

Jane makes one last phone call to Dr Selvig, arranging their meeting at the storage area with her van in it. They are trying their best to just look like the frazzled, insane science team that they were over a year ago, but this time with bonus Tony Stark. Which isn’t any kind of bonus, but it helps with the funding. They work out the schedule so that the Quinjet drops them off near town with Stark, who is looking as low key as possible, Cap and Hawkeye have been figuring out where to park the plane near Thor’s crash site.

The Quinjet is crazy fast in getting to New Mexico, but it’s still a cross-country flight. Darcy tries to read at first, then tries to do some work, but her mind is too full of figures to get them arranged in a meaningful way. Jane is typing away on a laptop; Tony is doing work on his tablet (and talking to JARVIS, something that never gets old. Darcy gets the giddies when she controlled Netflix with her kinect, she loves living in the future) and harassing Jane every few minutes to look at something. Cap and Clint are in the cockpit, flying and sketching respectively.

“I can’t believe they let you fly a plane, Barton.” She says from just beyond the cockpit.

“They explained it to me in very small words. Plus, I get to make pew pew pew sounds if I fire on anything.” He replies, making a hand wavy motion to come on in. Steve looks up from his sketchbook and tries to stand up to let Darcy sit but she waves him off.

“How are you feeling today, Darcy?” Steve asks and points to his own neck.

“Contrary to this delightful pattern, I’m doing fine. Talking sucks after awhile, but I’ve always bruised easily. My junior year, before the internship, I was with this guy that thought it was just hilarious to pinch patterns on my thighs.” Clint’s grip tightens on the controls and Steve turns a little pink at his ears. Which is an improvement, because the last time she talked about sex around him, his blush may have well gone down to his feet, “But uh, yeah. I kind of feel better than I have in months, really since this whole thing started.”

“Being able to prove yourself is a great healer.”

“I think I would have preferred to heal some other way. That sucked. What are you working on?”

“Nothing really, just doodles,” Steve turns the sketchpad around to show. The artwork is. …familiar.

“Steve, did you do the art for that Avengers game?” Steve gives her what can only be described as a shit-eating grin and touches his nose, “You so did. You are awesome, Captain Rogers. Is this for more levels? Is it? Who does the programming, can I test it?”

“Yes, not telling, and maybe.”

“Ten minutes till landing, kid. Go get into an upright, seated position.” Barton says.

“You sure know how to make that sound sexy, Barton.” She goes back to her seat, where Jane and Tony are still talking at fifty words a second and none of them make any sense when put into a row.

After they land at the airstrip outside of town…one that had been constructed by SHIELD when they were investigating Thor’s Hammer, Selvig greets them with a standard issue black SUV and drives them to Jane’s long term storage. Tony looks at the town with an expression that says he’s seen more interesting scenic backdrops in terrorist hovels, but amazingly keeps his mouth shut. Pepper is such a good influence on him.

“Van or RV, do you think?” Jane asks Darcy.

“Van. We might need to run Thor over again to prove it’s us, and the bumper already has his imprint.” She grabs the keys from Jane’s hand, “I’ll drive. You stay here and think about the proper way to find a boyfriend.”

When she comes back, Jane and Selvig are talking softly with each other, and the way they keep looking at her, briefest of glances, means they are talking about her. She makes out the words “getting better” and “subdued” and “kind of hilarious, really” and that last one just doesn’t fit with the others. She rolls her eyes at them, and from a few feet away yells to get in the van.

                                                                                            *

“And now we will be reaching peak boredom in about five minutes. Can I turn on some music?” Darcy doesn’t whine, she emotes.

“No!” A trio of voices yells at her. Jane’s explained that the vibrations coming from the van could screw up the placement of the equipment. There are four devices, so she knows she’ll be manning one later, but right now, they won’t let her touch anything. Hawkeye’s searching for a high point, and scouting around but will probably settle for sprawling out on top of the van after finding a shit ton of nothing, and Cap is still sketching. She peers over at the paper to see him working on a female figure, pin-up style.

“Hey, that’s me isn’t it?”

“You’ve got the figure for it.”

“Damn straight I do,” Darcy tries to maneuver her way to get a better look, but Captain America glares at her (glares at her!) and she goes back to where she was, “Can I sit?” Steve nods and she sits where she stands. “When did you start doing pin-ups? No offense, but it doesn’t really seem your bag.”

“Some of the chorus girls asked me to draw them. After the first one corrected me when I drew a normal portrait, she showed me what she wanted. It kept going from there. I’m not a total prude, Darcy, I just don’t like crassness.”

“And the future is crass?”

“The future is very crass. Leaves nothing to the imagination,” he gives her what can only be his approximation of Tony’s dirty old man grin, “I really like imagination.”

For some reason, a dirty Captain America leaves Darcy sputtering.

“We’re ready!” Jane calls out, and points to the smaller of the pieces of equipment, “This one’s yours Darce!” Darcy gives Cap a smile and shakes her head. She gives Darcy instructions, which for once, are remarkably detailed and doesn’t try to bog her down with things she doesn’t need to know, nor insults what intelligence she does have.  Tony suits up, Cap takes up a position near Jane and Hawkeye finds some spot to set up in with his bow.

Jane does not like banter when there is actual work to be done, and she shoots Stark at least three glares of “you will cease this shit now” before he catches on. They don’t work in silence, but chatter is minimal and mostly restrained to system checks. Darcy has her station running last, and is a little let down when there isn’t any real noise coming from it. Selvig’s makes just the smallest amount. Jane takes up a running commentary of results, Selvig and Stark start doing the same, Darcy chirps in when she needs to. It’s a good half hour before her readings confirm what they are looking for and Darcy breaks the commentary with simply, “Look up.”

It’s a cloudy night. The weather didn’t cooperate with them, but the unmistakable sheen of a rainbow is there. Darcy can’t help herself, and starts humming Ride of the Valkyries. Instead of chiding her, Jane joins in, as does Tony.  And then the lightning show starts, carrying with it Thor, dropping majestically down to the ground.  Jane freezes for a moment, a little deer in the headlights expression on her face before a creeping grin breaks out and she’s running and leaps onto Thor. Thor booms at her, “MY LADY JANE!”

Darcy has to look away because there’s watching a reunion, and there’s watching makeouts. At a certain point it either needs to be porn time or it’s just gross. Captain American clears his throat, but they keep going. Stark clears his throat, and Darcy is sure it is just for spite that Thor is picking Jane up (not that that’s hard, Jane weighs like, a hundred pounds. Darcy can pick her up).

It always comes down to Darcy, “Hey big guy, the rest of us would like some love too!”

Thor puts Jane down and booms again, “LADY DARCY!” and yep, she’s going have to teach him volume control but now she’s the one being squeezed within an inch of her life, “Lady Darcy, someone has caused you a foul misdeed. Do we need to instill justice onto the land once again?”

“No Thor, I tased him, and he was taken by police.”

“Your lightening device has shown it’s worth. My friends and companions!”

The welcome wagon continues, and even Hawkeye stands down to greet Thor, but ultimately, him and Jane go off on a walk together while the last of the readings are collected, and the equipments packed and loaded. Cap made the executive decision to go back to New York as soon as possible, and the arrangements are made with local liaisons to get the van back to storage. The flight back is quieter, with most people sleeping through the flight, except for Steve and Clint who talk softly and infrequently. Thor manages to keep his voice to just below a normal speaking voice when he and Jane talk between her dropping off to sleep against him. Darcy drifts off into another dreamless sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Hawkeye is feeling Fabulous](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4m4q5O8p21rt38pko1_1280.jpg)
> 
>   
>  \--I have no idea who to give credit to. If you know, please share!
> 
> [ An example of the red, black and white artwork, that I find enchanting, by Lettiebobettie](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5sh0cs4Ni1qmt6n1o1_1280.jpg)


	4. Chapter 4

 

The week that Thor comes back and is appointed rooms befitting his position in Avengers Tower, Jane doesn’t really come down to her lab. Go Jane, obviously, but that cuts down on the work that Darcy has to do, which takes it to a nice manageable level. Then Tony decides to take Pepper over to Malibu, because apparently he didn’t get the soundproofing to work as well as he wanted, and her workload decreases to just Bruce and Shared Services, and really, she doesn’t know what to do with her free time. She helps out the assistants who craft the public face of science research, except for Cory, because he still won’t share, but there’s only so much to do there. She takes epic long lunches and hangs out in the common areas of the Avengers living space.

She renews her tumblr obsession, forwards the best pictures to Clint or Tony, even though Clint’s been in and out on follow-up missions from the traps that he and Natasha set up. Darcy has found her favorite tags to follow. She never shares anything from #superhusbands, because, wow, hilarity is not worth explaining modern fandom to Steve. But #avengers at home has some surprising sweet and accurate group fan art.  But a new tag has popped up since Thor’s return, well several new tags, including #fuckyeahthor, and #hotgod, but this one has Darcy a little well flabbergasted because #avengers groupies does not seem like something to fangirl over. She ignores it for a little while, because it starts out as just a way for fangirls to find each other, but it starts getting weird.

The tag now has pictures of the clean-up crews, SHIELD agents, and some scientists, really the public face of SHIELD, interacting with the Avengers when they are caught in public or after some random attack that they fight off. But it shifts again to more paparazzi photos and personal photos that individuals have been taking.  By the middle of the week, there’s gossip about them, and Jane was quickly identified both as a former Culver post-doc and as Thor’s girlfriend, and since she and Thor are pretty much inseparable, there’s lots of pictures.

And then she finds herself. The first photo was one previously published in like OK! or something like that as part of “They are just like us!” and it’s of one of the science lunches, and she’s not named at all. Darcy’s pretty sure it’s the one where she and Tony were having a passionate argument about the relative merits of the Lord of the Rings movies against the books, because she is up in his face, and he’s giving her the “You spend too much time with Clint” look.  The post has been reblogged a few dozen times, and she reads through the notes.

_OMG, who is she? Are there any more pics with her?_

_I can’t read it, but she’s got a SHIELD badge on. Can anyone make out a name?_

_No name, but it’s in science division coloring._

_She looks so familiar._

_I’ve seen her before! I’ll post photos!_

 

Darcy follows, as the door opens and Clint walks in. He looks exhausted in a very smart, expensive looking blue suit, and there’s a cut on his cheek. Not deep, but enough that it looks like his bow went the wrong way and smacked him.

“Hey kid,” he says, more or less falling down on the couch next to her, “what are you looking at?”

“Me, apparently. I think I’m about to be Internet famous.” Darcy narrows her eyes, “Are you wearing makeup?”

“Tasha does it to me sometimes. When I need to look less like me.”

“It’s ridiculous.” Her purse is right on the ground and she pulls out her makeup kit to grab the remover wipes. She maneuvers herself so that she’s holding his head still to take off the worst of it, her laptop balanced on her thighs, “You look much better as yourself.”

“Ops an op, sometimes looking like me isn’t an option. Especially now that people might know what I look like.”

“They know what you look like as Hawkeye. Clint Barton looks different from him,” she drops the wipe on the coffee table, “And what were you supposed to be this time?”

“Sales executive. For some reason, Tasha pulls off being the coder geek better than I do.” He grabs hold of the arm that was holding his head and moves Darcy around so that he can look over Darcy’s shoulder at her laptop, “No really, what are you looking at?”

“Apparently, just following you around isn’t exciting enough for the fangirls, we in the benches are being called up to play as well.” The post she followed to starts off with just text.

_SO OMG, I work near the Tower, so I see some interesting sights. So I take my camera everywhere now. I was people watching from a balcony (my breaks are really boring, k) last weekend (ugh, overtime) and caught this._

It’s unmistakably Darcy, just before she tasers her attacker. Darcy doesn’t like looking at the photo. Sure, it’s kinda fuck yeah, I got out of that! But it’s only been about a week, and doesn’t really like dwelling.

_I’m about to call the cops, but the guy just like, falls and she comes out the winner (go-go Avenger Groupie!), when THIS HAWT ASS shows up. I couldn’t get a face shot, but I know that ass anywhere, and I think you do too. I caught a whole series._

“I have that great of a butt?”

“I don’t know how I keep my hands off of it, superhero.” Darcy scrolls through the pictures. Clint holding the gun at the guy, Natasha showing up (who, apparently isn’t as recognizable to the fangirls, cause she’s just noted as a SHIELD agent), but what gets the comments going are all of the pictures of Clint kneeling down by Darcy, or when he’s holding her.

_Does he do that to everyone he rescues? I’ve not seen that before._

_IF HE DOES, I so need to be rescued!_

_WHO IS SHE, WHY THE TOUCHING._

_I am having so many feels now, guys. Widow might have competition._

_OMG, DID SHE BREAK THEM UP. TRAMP_

_No slut shaming!_

_She still looks familiar._

Darcy didn’t quite realize just how much Clint had held on to her afterwards. Even walking back to the tower, his arm was around either her waist or shoulder, switching as if he couldn’t decide how close to hold her. The next comment is just a link to a youtube video of her graduation from Culver.

_That’s her! She’s that really unlucky girl with the killer elbow._

She looks at the date on the conversation, seeing that it happened two days ago, and types in her name in search, and is rewarded with photo after photo, some old, some new of her and Jane and Thor shopping yesterday, and disturbingly, her coffee run this morning. That one causes Clint to tense behind her, “That’s not a paparazzi photo. That’s surveillance.”

“Why would anyone want to watch me be a flunky? That’s….”

“You are close to all of us now. When AIM got you, it was because they wanted Jane or leverage. Now you argue with Tony, eat lunch with Bruce, shop with Thor and…well.” Clint suddenly goes quiet.

“There are others that hang out with you guys too.”

“And because it’s obvious that you get to me.”  He says into her hair, “Darce…you get to me.” He’s over her shoulders still and brushes a kiss against her cheek.

“Can’t be that obvious, I didn’t notice.” Darcy sets her laptop on the coffee table and reseats herself closer to Clint, taking his hand in hers, because that seems like a really good idea to try out.

 Clint exhales, “I think you may have been the only one not to notice. We really need to work on your observation skills.”

Darcy only answers by taking their entwined hands and placing them over her shoulder, “Hmm, I can practice that skill.” She smiles and kisses Clint tentatively. He does not seem to like tentative very much, and meets her with thorough, and Darcy agrees with that revision. Thorough is good, mind-numbingly good, and she’s pretty sure her toes are going to start curling in a moment from just making out on a couch.

“So, where do you want this to go?” Clint asks, kissing into her neck.

“Uhh, yeah —-I think that’s going to be a joint decision. Let me do some more observing here, rack up some evidence. I don’t suppose there’s any way to keep this even a little quiet?”

Clint laughs low and dirty in her ear, “Sweetheart, I’m pretty sure JARVIS has already alerted Stark and he’s setting up a ticker-tape parade. And I’m pretty sure my master spy partner is watching us from somewhere.”

“The little voyeur.” Darcy is pulled into Clint’s lap and she gives him a dangerous look. He kisses her deeply and laughs into her mouth when her hands dip under his shirt, “How far would it take to make her a little uncomfortable?”

“Tasha? Pretty damn far.”

“Well then—” she goes in for more kissing, but is interrupted by her cellphone alarm, “Fuck, it is the middle of the work day, isn’t it?”

“We can have time. I will totally make time.”

“No, no, that was my ten minute warning for my meeting with Shared Services. They’ve been tearing apart the data from the Bifrost, and I have to turn it into something you can understand.” She kisses him neatly, a smack on the lips, “Besides, I’m not that easy.”

Clint takes a moment to consider, “Ice cream?”

“Your observation skills are as keen as ever.” Darcy gets to her feet and feels her hair, trying to rearrange it so it doesn’t look like she was just midway through being debauched. Clint gets up too and actually walks her to the door and manages not to undo her fixed hair. As she walks down the hall to the elevator, she hears him call out for Natasha.

She doesn’t get her ice cream that night, because someone let a robot with laser beams out in New Jersey which keeps the Avengers out for most of the night. Darcy, worry already blossoming in her stomach, marches over to Jane’s lab with the results from Shared Services, and spends the time hunkered down, picking out flaws and interpretations and implications.

“This just doesn’t fit right here with the rest of the information,” Jane says her head in her hands, holding onto her hair, “This is exactly what I expected opening the bridge and getting it structurally sound. You should use that by the way.”

“Yeah, that will be good. Easily understood,” Darcy responds, “and look at you with the metaphor use. You’re learning!”

“But these readings just don’t make sense. They look like something I was going to try earlier. If you can’t repair the bridge, make a new one. But since I don’t possess Asgardian science-magic, I wasn’t going to be able to do that.”

“What if someone was trying to build a new bridge? How would they do that?”

“They couldn’t make it to Asgard. That’s the only bridge there, and from what I understand, anything permanent is going to look like that.”

Jane and Darcy exchange a look, “Maybe we should be asking Thor a few questions about the other worlds. And I was so looking forward to light week.”

                                                                                            *

Clint’s all gross and sweaty when he gets back the next morning, but he walks by Darcy’s desk on his way to his debriefing. She knows she’s out of the way for that and all he has time for is a quick kiss, but it’s good to see him whole and well. He promises ice cream for sure tonight and says that she needs to check her email.

The email she’s sure he’s referencing is new security procedures for half a dozen science staff, all ones she’s seen photos of while tumblr surfing, herself and Jane included. Those not currently living in the tower have been assigned temporary spaces, which they should avail themselves of, and they need to be escorted when off the premises. Security details, joy of joys. It’s not like she didn’t realize something would happen once she show Clint the photos, and she’s pretty sure she’s got an escort wherever she wants to go, but really, when did this become her life?

The really unsettling thing is Natasha, in her full getup, asking her, “Are you okay with being bait?”

Darcy blinks, “Um, excuse me?”

“Bait. The person who we dangle just out of reach so that we catch the evil guys.”

“Uhh.... I thought we agreed that wasn’t in the job description.”

“Tasha, I haven’t had the chance to…” Clint says, appearing behind her, still in uniform, less actively gross looking, “…ask yet.”

Natasha snorts, “You dawdle too much.”

Darcy circles her hand in the federally recognized “get on with it” motion, and Clint does.

“So, we’re pretty sure that the stolen research and the surveillance on you is linked, but we are trying to sort out whose who and where from the tumblr thing. So, what do you say to some very public dates?”

Darcy gets a real case of the giggles, “Yeah, you weren’t kidding about no way this would be kept quiet.”

“Stark has already sent me three text messages. One was from the suit.”

“Yeah, sure,” Darcy shrugs, “I mean, people already seem to be watching me, why not turn the tables and let us get information from it. And, I can totally ruin some fangirls days.”

Turns out, some photographer managed a fairly clear shot of Hawkeye up on the roof (the angle was worrisome, almost as if the person was literally ON the side of a building when they took the shot, but hey, one problem at a time) and it was already published on tmz.  It caught him at an unguarded moment, where his intense gaze had softened, and you could see the man behind the superhero. There wasn’t really an excuse not to exploit the opportunity and Clint reluctantly agreed. It wasn’t so much his loss of plausible anonymity as much as not wanting more surveillance on Darcy. But they need to track down what area of AIM (it’s so hard to take down a well rooted and publicly noted company and their subsidiaries these days) and they can’t really think of anything else so handy.

Clint and Natasha lay down ground rules. Darcy’s security detail is far less obvious than the others. She meets agents Merrick and Perriweather and they look far more lab assistant than badass, no matter how much Natasha vouches for their competency. Darcy is to act completely normal (for her), and is not supposed to dress more awesome just because she anticipates being photographed. She is not to reblog any of her own photos. “I don’t have a tumblr myself, “ she lies without shame, “well, okay, but it’s mostly set up so that I can show Cap some of the funny without subjecting him to you know, the rest of the internet.”

But as compensation, Clint gets cleaned up and takes Darcy out to a small ice cream joint he knows about because the man has a sweet tooth, and also a childhood love of funnel cake.  They split a sundae that has its basis on said funnel cake, and lean into each other.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. That didn’t actually happen. Stark does not voluntarily let you drive. Anything. Least of all one of his sports cars, and not the new one. Doesn’t he have a chauffeur anyways?”

“Happy.”

“Wow, usually it takes a lot more for you to express feelings. We could work on the execution though, one word is not enough.”

“No, Darcy, his chauffeurs name is Happy. Happy Hogan.”

“Does he hire his employees based on their nicknames, or does he graciously bestow them? He called me Sugar Tits once, does that mean I work for him now?”

“No, you know when you work for Tony Stark when he actually lets you boss him around. Wait, you’ve done that, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, but it’s mostly through Pepper.” Clint feeds her the last bite of the sundae, “I get the last bit of funnel cake?”

“It’s soggy, all yours now.” He follows with a sound kiss and a whisper to her ear, “Iphone camera to our left, girl in a Captain America t-shirt.”

“Oh, is that why you are kissing me?” She teases.

“Nope, you taste like vanilla and powdered sugar.”

Darcy is all for public displays of affection, and copious amounts of public makeouts but Clint vetos that line of reasoning as a mature adult well beyond that part of his life. Barely.

 

Darcy puts herself in charge of the tumblr monitoring. Okay, the unofficial monitor because there are actual agents in charge, but damnit, the photos are of her and she’s going to keep track. The picture is posted during the night as, “LOOK WHO MY FRIEND SAW AT ICE CREAMS!” It’s mostly a picture of Clint, but Darcy is visible, and his arm is firmly around her waist in the booth. The original post has about 500 reblogs by morning, and thousands over the next few days, and the reblogs are hilarious. Half seem to think Hawkeye is cheating on Black Widow, a few have started connecting Darcy in #Avenger Groupies, and quite a few are straight up congratulating her. There are at least three impromptu fic tags, and while she’s pretty sure she can’t bend that way, she’s not averse to trying it out later.

Later, being the key word because the very public dating aside, they’ve seemed to settle on slow but hot as the speed of their relationship, which suits Darcy just fine. It’s not too much of a jump to go from friend to boyfriend, it’s that having to present it to a fan base is just weird. They don’t go out every day, but they’ve hit up the coffee shop a couple of times, or Clint follows her down when she hangs out with the other assistants as they chain smoke outside the tower. He’s a solid presence with her, and she quickly learns that what he doesn’t express though words is done through touch. She’s not sure at all how she missed this before, just how much he made excuses to be by her side. And now that it’s part of his job, he’s a little overboard about it.

“Honey, I’m not sure I can bend that way and I can do acrobatics,” Clint reads over her shoulder as she’s scrolling through #hawtass fic.

“Shhh, I’m getting to the good part.”

There have been two surveillance shots so far, but they were sold to press instead of originating online, seemingly for a tabloid piece on “The Avengers Loves”. And really, just boring. Well, the bit on Pepper isn’t, but that’s because Pepper is awesome. One photo is of her on a smoke break outside the tower, (she doesn't smoke, but it's a great way to get out and get gossip), one of Darcy and a weedy looking assistant (Perriweather) running an errand during the day. It’s almost amazing that all this shit about her on the internet doesn’t make far outside of it, tabloid spread notwithstanding, so she doesn’t get any strange phone calls from her mother or anything (and that’s a conversation she’s not looking forward to having sometime soon. Hi mom, in addition to working for the superhero temp agency, I also get my life threatened on a daily basis! And I’m dating an Avenger, yeah, the one about a decade older than me. No, not the billionaire) and she doesn’t see herself on TV very often.

At the same time, the public dates are almost perfunctory, unneeded, because the real dates are movies in the Avenger’s living room, or Clint bringing her lunch. Public dates are for trading sarcasm and kisses, things both of them were already good at, but the tower is where they lay themselves down as much as they can. Clint’s got too many secrets to be utterly upfront about anything, but he’s direct about that, nothing about what missions he’s gone on that she hasn’t been present for, or unless Natasha has brought it up but he does tell her about the circus, about how he started arching, about his brother. He hesitates over his brother’s name, she sees. Clint bites his lip just a moment before he schools his features into unreadibility and she’s okay with that, they have time. He’s trying to find the line between being too quiet about himself and oversharing. If he verges a little bit over on oversharing from time to time and has to backpedal, Darcy can appreciate it.

For her part, Darcy is the queen of oversharing. She’s spent entire dinners on an ill-advised college road trip, that she hasn’t had a full nights sleep or a memorable dream since she got here, how she managed to be six science credits short and applied for Dr Fosters home for wayward particle physics (it was totally not what the listing had said. She may have been the only one to apply, but that was probably because Jane can’t write a summary to save her life), and about her mother and her lifelong obsession with Darcy’s sartorial selections, which is probably why Darcy has lived in oversized sweaters and hats for years. Her mom should not be that obsessed with showing off her daughter’s cleavage.

“My freshman year, I’m home over Thanksgiving break and she hauls me into the kitchen and unbuttons my top another two buttons, and says that any girl should be proud of what I’ve got and not to hide it.”

Clint laughs and takes the opportunity to run his hands up Darcy’s sides, ending in a cupping caress over her breasts over her shirt. They may be alone, but it’s the common area, they are never really alone there “They are amazing.”

“I know that. But I prefer to think of them as a secret weapon for intimidation, and too much showcasing ruins that.”

“I’m so very much not intimidated. I have plans. Methodical ones.”

The tumblr tags start picking up, and they start the work of tracking down the AIM cell doing surveillance on the scientists. The gossip sites flow like honey on Darcy and Jane, but beyond toying with the fangirl contingent, both decide to get on with their lives. Darcy stops most of the public dates, since they’ve picked up enough interest for there to be pictures nearly every time she goes outside. There’s work, and there’s his insistence that Natasha try to teach her some self-defense, which does not end well for anyone. Darcy doesn’t have the patience to keep trying after failure after failure, and while a few things stick, it’s mostly the how to fall and pick herself back up to run away sort of things. She’s signed up for small arms training during her downtime and that goes a lot better, even if her accuracy is slow going, and the first time she fires she was so not prepared for a kickback and fell over. She’s never going to be a sharpshooter, but she’s more likely to hold her own. She declines a service gun, though, knowing she’s far better with her taser.

                                                                                   *

“Did I get the memo about what?” She asks Tony when he stops in to pester her, “And since when do you read memos?”

“I read memos. I just forget them afterwards. That’s what Pepper is for, to remind me what the memo said.”

“So which memo was this?”

“The itinerary for the NYC Private to Public Conference in…. I don’t remember, a couple of weeks. I’m not going myself, but I have a flunkey who is. Meet up with her beforehand to compare notes.”

“I wasn’t invited to that one. My boss was presenting,” her tablet beeps at her, and she stares at Tony after reading it, “and they are going on vacation. Fuck. I don’t want to present. I’m not even sure what we are supposed to present. What is this thing anyways?”

“Stupid name, right? Public and Government organizations meeting with Private industry to discuss non-classified breakthroughs and impacts they will have on the city as a whole. Stark Industries is talking energy and communications systems. “ Stark explains, sitting on Darcy’s desk. She pokes at him to try to get him off of it, but he’s got good balance, and they absolutely do not start a girlie slap fight after he pokes her back.

“Oh, can you go play with Jane? She’s…hey, stop that!” she giggles as he keeps trying to poke her, “She’s brainstorming and would like a second brain to play with.”

“Yeah sure. You kick ass at that presentation.”

“You betcha, Stark.”

Darcy hates presenting. She’s a quick thinker most of the time, but get her in front of a bunch of people to talk about something that wasn’t the latest episode of whatever, and the seconds it takes for her to scan her head and come up with an answer make her face turn red just thinking about it. It’s the real downside to her flighty nature that everything is always so in her head, that bringing up something specific takes time and effort. She can write a grant, she can write memos and reports and do it one on one and maybe a small group, but reading through the event details…. its a conference. A fairly large one, even if most of the attendees are Staff Assistants and such. It’s really a who’s who of the tech firms and government agencies in the city.

Sighing, Darcy sits into her chair and pulls up the non-classified, public knowledge memos for the past six months because the only way to defeat her brain is to attack it with ruthless efficiency.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the tags are made up, other are fantastic fun. 
> 
> Darcy's mother is probably the most fully-fleshed person I have ever created in my head.
> 
> Thank you again for all the comments, kudos, asks, likes and whatnot. I have a grin in the back of my head that just does not stop.


	5. Chapter 5

 

Never let it be said that Darcy doesn’t love a challenge. The conference work comes together easily enough, although it would have been nice if her boss had done any prep work. Darcy has had to figure out everything from what to what to present (Non-lethal/non-violent platforms and their specialized search and rescue equipment that have become by-products of the more top-secret classified research) to the arrangements of how to get there, and their specialized security (Stark saves the day, his car is taking both his rep and Darcy, and Darcy’s detail). She makes charts and graphs and epic PowerPoint that she writes and rewrites with different material and pretty much lives at her desk or her bed and really misses the long lunches from last week. Or just an actual lunch.

Clint brings her coffee when he’s around. It’s not often, since he and Natasha are criss-crossing the country with their sales and geek pitch. Hilariously, SHIELD did such a good job with their fake program that it actually sells more often than not. The dummy corporation is a great place to work by all accounts and their webpage has pictures of the staff, which amuses Darcy to no end, because seeing corporate headshots of her favorite master spies is awesome.

But at night, Darcy tosses and turns, her dreamless sleep mutating into insomnia that only relents for a few hours sleep culminating in her waking up in sweat and terror. Until this week, it’s only happened a few times since, well everything started, and now she’s starting to get flashes and images before she wakes, and at least once woke with a choked off scream and a phantom pressure on her throat. It’s been getting harder to not stay the night with Clint when he’s actually there, comfortable and warm. He gets a closed off sad look in his eyes each time she begs off and puts her clothes back on. She tries to kiss the look off his face, but that’s getting harder too. And it’s stupid but knowing you shouldn’t be ashamed of something and not actually being ashamed and scared are totally different and much harder.

Tonight, the flashes start just as she closes her eyes, and any attempt to still her rebelling stupid brain is futile. She grabs a blanket and tries to head to the roof, but the moment the doors close on the elevator, her breath hitches and comes in spurts and she shakes. She jabs at the button for the next floor and is only a step away from falling out when the doors open.  She slowly takes the stairs back to her floor and her apartment and the let down from the panic is enough to get her to sleep.  Sleep doesn’t last long; her first full-fledged nightmare since she was a kid, much less in the months since graduation, grabs hold of her. She’s being smothered in her cell, the walls moving and creaking to contort her as she’s being crushed, and the bright lights go out and she’s plunged into darkness when she wakes up.

She doesn’t even stop to lock her door, just runs right out and up the stairs to the Avengers floor, through their common area and to the door of Clint’s suite. She has no idea if he’s in tonight, just knocks incessantly. The door opens, and there’s Clint, bare to the waist, wiping sleep from his eyes, “Baby?” he asks, not really awake yet and then takes stock of Darcy in front of him. She’s wearing a grey pajama set that’s seen better days and threadbare, she’s not wearing her glasses, her hair is a mess, and it’s not a fun mess, and she’s covered in old and new sweat. And she’s barefoot. Very few people in the tower ever go without their shoes, or at least keeps something between the floor and their naked feet outside of their rooms. You never know who has been bleeding after all. “Darcy, what’s wrong—” Darcy closes the distance between them and wraps herself around Clint. He’s solid; his grasp immediately tightens around her.

“I can’t go to sleep.” Her voice is small and muted further by his chest.

“Can’t, won’t or afraid?” he replies, drawing circles against her back, and moving her away from the open door, before she wakes everyone else up. No one is a heavy sleeper in this part of the Tower, and there’s almost always someone awake at night.

“Can the answer be all of the above?” she says, breaking apart to find a place to sit. The floor is a good place, she decides and slips down and curls up on her knees. It’s too cramped and she stands back up, and makes a wide stance instead, letting her back hold up the wall.

The time for immediate comfort is over, and Clint approaches and stands next to her, just taking her hand as reassurance that he’s here and real, “Yeah. That’s legitimate. You started dreaming again?”

Darcy’s expression falls down, “Yes.”

“Did we get you?”

“No. Crushed before you could. Walls closed in from side and bottom, I folded in on myself. Took all the breath right out.”

“I’ve got you now. You are safe with me, right here.”

“Am I?” Darcy asks, finally looking up, “It seems like I’m never safe. I have a detail and a panic button that brings all the boys to the yard. I get followed going out for a cupcake and going out with you. I was kidnapped for being an intern. I was almost mugged for no reason at all in daylight. When do I get to be safe, Barton?”

Clint brings her hand up and kisses her fingers, “Certainty in your safety left the day you and Dr Foster left for New Mexico. What you have now is resilience in the face of that uncertainty. You embrace it, you control what you can and mitigate what you don’t.”

“Easy for you. You’ve got the crazy everything,” she curls into him, wanting the contact, “I’ve got the crazy nothing.”

“I’ve never been safe, and I wasn’t always what I am now. You won’t always be what you are right this moment. Right this moment, your brain has to work this out. It’s got to work out what has you scared. And we got to find what works to keep you present through it. Tony tinkers, works out engineering problems, Bruce sits zazen, Steve….”

“Draws? I see him draw.”

“No, he says that he wants to keep that away from this. He…oh Darcy, you really can’t tell anyone this.” Darcy looks up at Clint confused, “He crotchets. Granny squares and potholders and all sorts of things.”

Darcy laughs, “And you?”

“I find Tasha. She finds me. Sometimes just a check-in, sometimes a fight, very occasionally…well; now I’m hoping I can find you instead. And we can talk about that, but later, because this isn’t about me, and it’s not about how you can get the conversation away from yourself. Do you remember your first words after we loaded you on the helicopter?” Darcy shakes her head, “Mind you, this was after you called Natasha and I the A-team, but your first real thought was for Jane. Despite being half-starved and dehydrated, and crammed into that tiny cell, your first aware thought was for your friend. You learn a lot about someone in those moments, and yours was that you weren’t safe until you knew. And that’s your resilience, sweetheart. You can trust in that.”

Darcy is quiet for a few moments, “Some of the flashes are more... things I hear. I hear Jane screaming from a cell next to me as mine just gets smaller. She’s grabbed and not me. I can’t stop it.”

“Brains suck sometimes,” Clint says, pulling Darcy off of the wall and walks her down to the bedroom, “But it’ll get better, and the nightmares will be fewer. It won’t be fixed tonight, but trust yourself that you will come back together.”

“You’ll be there?” Darcy yawns, and wraps herself up in one of the blankets before lying down.

“Not leaving your side unless you tell me to, sweetheart.”

Clint arranges himself next to her, not wanting to constrict her, but places his leg over hers to ground her, and at some point during the night, Darcy turns over to rest her head against his chest. She doesn’t sleep easily, dreams but stays asleep.

                                                                                   *

Day of the conference, Darcy dresses in what Clint calls “my every naughty librarian fantasy” and Darcy calls putting on her assets of mass intimidation. And shoes. They may not be super high end, but they are expensive, glorious things that put her almost at eye level with her boyfriend. She meets her Stark Industries counterpart in the lobby, with Agent Merrick trailing her.

Carrie comes from the Ms Virginia-fucking-Potts school of style and her large frame is a fairly conservative skirt suit that tailored to the nines and she is mind numbingly gorgeous, long wavy blond hair and rocking it. They get on like a house on fire.

Carrie explains herself, “My masters is in Public Relations, but my undergrad was an MIT mechanical engineering degree. I got tired of being the only person at my old firm to be able to look people in the eye.”

Darcy responds back with, “I tased Thor, got kidnapped, then Captain America felt sorry and found me a job.”

“I think you may be the most qualified for what we do,” Carrie grabs shot glasses from the cars compact fridge (and it’s not even a limo, really Stark? Really?) and fills them up with the first whiskey she finds, “So cheers!”

The majority of the companies coming to present send their more straightforward marketing and sales types, more thinking of trying to sell their products to the various public and private agencies present. Darcy takes great joy whenever Carrie speaks up to eviscerate whatever stupid shit they are trying to sell, or better, challenges them to explain how something workers rather that just what it is supposed to do. It’s a beautiful train wreck watching HazardPro fumble over themselves as Carrie deconstructs in-truck waste management system into why it would not only fail structurally, but also actually have worse consequences for the environment.

Carrie’s presentation is flawless and more focused in advancements in their energy research and their timeline for wide scale implementation and an invitation to apply for their pilot program, “We are hoping to start with projects and agencies that promote the public good, and our application is weighted that way in selection,” and then moves into a very subtle pitch for their integrated communications and information platform. It almost sounds based on JARVIS but not quite. Like a very stupid version, maybe.

Darcy has herself a stomach in knots. There’s roughly the same amount of people here as there were in her senior capstone presentation and she threw up before that one.  On the other hand, she’s awesome, so she takes a deep breath and starts, “Good afternoon, I’m Darcy Lewis, Science Liaison for SHIELD and yes by proxy also the Avengers team. I’m going to be a little different today — SHIELD doesn’t really care about you buying things from us, but rather the effects and consequences of our latest tech. First, thanks to the cooperative agreement we have with Stark Industries, we’ve come out with a large range of non-violent tech and deterrence devices…” she continues on detailing what SHIELD will use on the streets during a situation.

Darcy still feels a little queasy but starts hitting her stride explaining a set of tools designed to aid search and rescue efforts in large-scale rubble. Which unfortunately seems happen more and more around the city. But people rebuild and restore and move on with living, and the city rebuilds.

After she answers the fifth question in a row with, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to answer that,” she ends the questions and answer session and sits back down, where more people ask her questions.

She and Carrie escape to the bathroom and of course, when they walk out, the coat check explodes. Darcy doesn’t see Agent Merrick anywhere, and her purse was in the damn coat check so she can’t hit her panic button, but bets being blown up might set it off. Carrie has already started running towards the conference area. Darcy first gawks at how well Carrie runs in her heels before following at a slightly more awkward run. The two of them work to get the survivors (there were far too many people getting their coats and such) out of the smoky rooms and out to the hallway where they can see well enough to get out of the building. The conference center wasn’t a large place, and they were the only ones scheduled for the day, a single floor, a central lobby and the conference rooms set up in quadrants. They are about overwhelmed with the smoke when it starts clearing and the two women are shoved into a backroom off the side of where the coat check used to be, and she can smell that there used to be fire here, but it was put out.

“GET BACK IN THERE.” A voice yells, “I got two, I got two back here.” Darcy can’t see him quite yet, but low to the ground she can see Merrick, unmoving on the ground. Darcy works her way to him with a yelp, and already knowing that Merrick is dead, swallows the lump in her throat, and starts performing CPR, the old fashioned way. She’s faking the mouth to mouth when the person yells at her again. She feels around Merrick’s ears and snags his earpiece and sets it to VOX. She’s kicked off the body hard and rolls over, ribs hurting. She takes her time sitting up and sets the earpiece.

“Please! He was my assistant!” she cries out, “Let me just check him!”

The smokes almost gone now and she can see that the attacker has Merrick’s service gun, “Really? An assistant? Please.” He’s not an imposing man. Short, weedy but he looks a little…unhinged. He keeps muttering to himself...but he has Merrick’s gun and not one of his own. Who packs their own explosives but not an actual weapon?

She goes with it, “Okay, not an assistant.” She looks over at Carrie, who does look a little terrified but is standing and holding it together. She’s also holding what looks to be a small keychain, and gives a half smile when she pushes her own panic button. ”But he was important to me. He was supposed to keep me safe.”

_“Ms Lewis? This is Agent Sitwell. We’ve got your position. We can coach you from here. Keep him talking.”_

Carrie’s looking at the man with a quizzical look, “Paul? Paul Walker?”

“Shut up!” the man looks at Carrie, but doesn’t move the gun. He doesn’t seem to be able to keep it still.

“My god, it is you Paul.” Carrie looks at him in disbelief, crossing her arms.

“Do you know everyone?” Darcy half whimpers, half groans.

“Paul used to work for Stark Industries, but he wasn’t welcome when we changed our business goals.”

“Fuck, they know me. They know me. What do I do?” Paul says, starting to pace a little bit, “Stark was crazy to let me go! I could have done great things!”

“You only knew how to design bombs, and you didn’t have the chops to change fields. We always let the dead weight go, it’s just good business sense.” Carrie says, getting back her steam, but he then grabs her close and shoves her down next to Darcy.

He groans in frustration, “How long do I need to keep them? Two. Yes.” He stalls for a second then mutters just loud enough for the two women to hear, “I should have been here today. Or my ideas at least. Sometimes the only way to get peace is through force.”

“If you can’t retrain, you need to find a better avenue for your current talents. And that’s not with Stark anymore.”

 “ _Stay down, and stay still. If you can get him to stay still, all the better.”_

Darcy doesn’t do what she’s told to. She’s never been all that good at that, “Sounds like you were taking the short way into villainy instead, Paul.”  Paul looks distracted, and she takes advantage of that to stand up and get a little in his face. “I don’t like villains and neither do my friends.”

Paul rolls his eyes and waves his gun over at Carrie, “What, her? What’s she going to do?”

“Hey, don’t aim at —what’s your last name again?”

“Messenger.”

“Seriously? Okay, Paul, don’t shoot the Messenger!” Darcy grins in spite of herself, “I can’t believe I just said that.”

“How much longer?” Darcy realizes the man isn’t crazy. Well, he’s crazy in the taking hostages sort of way, but not the hearing voices sort of way.

“How many are you talking to Mr Walker? Where are they from?” Darcy is not an expert in interrogation, but she’s hoping distraction and overtness is part of the spy toolbox.

“Two…fuck!” He says, and grabs Darcy by the chin and cheeks, pushing her jaw together, “Shut up now or I’m going to gag you.”

“Trust me,” she says through the pressure of his grip, “I can be just as obnoxious gagged.” There’s a choked sound over the earpiece and she doesn’t see the punch coming that knocks her back to the ground. When she looks back up at him, the gun is trained on her, and shit, she’s watched enough Burn Notice and is sleeping with a spy, and he means business now.

The first arrow hits Paul’s wrist, knocking the gun out of his hand. Carrie is closest to where it lands, and she grabs for it, copying his stance and trains it on him. The second arrow drops Paul to the ground, still alive and conscious, but really isn’t in any condition to get up.

Darcy laughs and singsongs, “My boyfriends back and you’re gonna be in trouble.”

“Hey-la-Day-la, my boyfriends back.” Carrie joins her on the backup.

Darcy calls upwards, “Two more in the building, Hawkeye.”

_“They got past the team, Ms Lewis. Get to the lobby, your escort is waiting.”_

 Darcy grabs Carrie and manhandles her to the entryway, “I think we can evacuate now.” She looks out and sees a few unnamable but recognizable agents running towards them. Half meet her in the lobby and surrounded them to walk them out, the other half go into the conference room. There’s a giant mess outside, reporters and cops and attendees. She hears Thor before she sees him, bellowing out her name, and then picking her up to hug her.

“I’m fine Thor, I’m fine! Oh please put me down, I got kicked there.” The next set of arms around here are more welcome wrapped around her shoulders, and she leans back a bit, and a kiss is dropped on her temple, “huh, when did I lose my shoes, I’m short again.”

“Good work darling girl,” Hawkeye says, because he can’t drop the identity right now, so he can’t soften and relax and be Clint, “I knew I liked you for a reason.”

“Oh god, it is true. The internet never lies,” Carrie laughs.

Hawkeye drops another sweet kiss to the temple (and if that’s not photo op, the AP has fallen down on the job. Darcy is going to have to call her mom tonight, “Mom, don’t panic, but I got taken ineptly hostage today. But I’m fine! I was wearing a tit shirt just like you always want me to.” She might even have to mention the boyfriend part now) and heads back into the building because he is working after all.

Some agent is trying to escort Carrie and Darcy over to a waiting medic, but Darcy still isn’t following directions very well and gets in the way of a news broadcast, she doesn’t catch which one.

“…Live at the scene where a bomb exploded at a tech conference for the cities major agencies and private companies…”the reporter sees Darcy and Carrie, “with us now are two of the heroes from the bombing, two women from eyewitness reports that risked their lives to get their fellow attendees to safety before being held captive. Ladies, can you tell us what made you go further in the building?”

Carrie responds, “Have you seen who we work for? Anything else would have been disappointing.”

Darcy, “Also that this woman must practice running in high heels.”

They are escorted away after that, and Darcy has never been more thankful for being surrounded by agents.

Tumblr’s biggest reblog over the next day is from #Avengers Groupies, and it’s one of the small kisses from Hawkeye and a gif of Carrie and Darcy speaking to reporters. Darcy isn’t allowed to speak to reporters anymore, and Tony is so proud of Carrie’s quip that he changes the wallpaper on all the computers to that still, and makes sure it stays that way.

                                                                                   *

Darcy gingerly sits down next to Jane a few days later on the roof. Ribs, still, ow. “I hate after action reports. I hate that I have to write them, I hate why I have to write them, and most importantly I hate brainstorming ways I could have done things better.”

“Well, then you should stop getting involved in things that cause you to write them,” Jane replies in her best matter of fact tone.

But this is Darcy, and Darcy loves drama, “I’m doomed,” she nods her head at the man beside Jane, “Is Thor passed out?”

“It’s been a long day. He had, no shit, diplomatic meetings today. He got to indulge in his speechifying self, but apparently the man can be in action for days on end and not get tired, but talking leaves him tuckered.”

“Aww, poor little guy.” The two women dissolve into giggles.

“How are you doing, Darcy?” Jane isn’t known for her tact, and she has her concern face on, but she tries to explain anyways, “ You don’t seem to have, I don’t know. Luck? Things….that?”

Darcy cocks her head to think. Taking stock, she should be feeling more than a little bit awful. Isn’t there a scale about that? She’s probably off the chart. But she doesn’t feel awful, “A little rough around the edges, and I can’t say good, but way better than bad.” She waves her hand at the skyline, “Look at the city Jane. It’s been trampled, raided and terrified for a few years now. And still, people rebuild and stay. So I’m not going anywhere, I’m rebuilding myself.”

“We can rebuild her, make her stronger.”

“That would be way funnier if I didn’t know that SHIELD would be all upons that if given the opportunity.” Darcy lies back to relax.

The night is clear and while the city provided ample light pollution, it’s still a nice night for star counting, or watching planes, as it is more likely to be. Jane is half asleep against Thor while the sky starts turning a curious pea-green color. Darcy sees a deep blue thread shoot out from somewhere behind the Tower overhead. The thread becomes a ripple and then a wave.

“Jane!” Darcy shoves her friend, and both Jane and Thor wake up, “Please tell me this is something natural.”

“Not by any sort of nature I am aware of.” They all get to their feet and watch as the wave…solidifies and soars overhead, thickening into what looks like a sheet of ice before it just stops in the middle of the sky. There’s a horrible creaking sound. Thor has his arm outstretched, summoning Mjolnir to him. It reaches just as the creaking noise becomes a crackling.

The ice shutters and falls down in shards thourought the city. The three of them take cover where they can and as the pieces hit the roof, they splash into water.

“Thor,” Jane says from the kneeling position she took beside him, “what would a bridge to Jotunheim look like?”

“ I confess I would not know. There has never been one from Midgard.”

“I need to get to my lab. Darcy, get a sample. I don’t know, somehow!”

“Right behind you.” Jane is already halfway down the stairs when Darcy finally finds a discarded cup to grab the…well, hopefully not just water.

The labs get woken up, called in and Jane asks for equipment from a warehouse, “No, really, I need it. It can track and manipulate what...ugh, you don’t need the specifics, the energy signatures used to create the conditions needed to create the Einstein-Rosen bridge. Just get it from storage.”

When SHIELD reviews the security footage, they find that the warehouse was raided at the same time as the explosion at the conference center.  Darcy feels anger pulsating through her body throughout the briefing, and she drums her fingers in an increasingly frustrated pattern on the table. Too many dead, just as a distraction, because AIM knows that SHIELD will always protect their own.

Clint tries to talk with her afterwards, but she blows him off with a “Can it, Barton. I need to shoot something.”

“What, and I can’t help with that?”

“God no, Barton. I’m seriously considering calling my mother if I don’t go shoot something, alone, for a little while. I’ll find you when I’m done.” She rises up on her tiptoes, mostly because it makes her boyfriend happy, and pecks a kiss on his cheek.

“Center mass, sweetheart.”

“Neat little holes, asshole.”

 

She doesn’t do all that great shooting, but it makes her feel better, and she doesn’t even have to call her mother to vent about classified things. She lets Clint wrap his arms around her instead, telling her that it’s not her fault and they are totally going to kick all the asses in AIM and Jane’s going to be a genius and stop whatever the hell they are trying to do. That, Darcy can totally get behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank my sister-in-law for entertaining me several times during downtime a couple of weekends ago at Tribal Revolution by relaying the story of Captain America: Craft Avenger. If she never writes it down, the world will be a sadder place.


	6. Chapter 6

 

What Darcy can’t get behind, is that everyone seems to be leaving right when she thinks they should be sticking together. Thor, she can understand. He’s gone home, with quite a tearful and cliché goodbye to Jane, to see if anything can be done on the Asgard end of the bridge building, and futz with the magic end. That just makes logical sense.

No, what she’s pissed about is Clint and Natasha off again, not on the software road show that keeps them away for a day or two at a time and Clint has started calling that his day job, but on some mission that has been in the works for months, that they can’t talk about, can’t say where they are going, how they get there, or when they should get back. 

It’s bad enough that she’s without her boyfriend while she’s stressed out and working with Jane again. It’s worse because two days after the bridge falls over the city, the puddles, which never became runoff and was a bitch for the city to try to cleanup, gel up into squads of human-sized trolls, who routinely attack the population of New York. The remaining Avengers and every field agent worth anything are working shifts trying to clear them out of the city, but they are smart, brutal and actually have a rough idea of tactics. Darcy doesn’t have a detail anymore, but that’s okay, because she pretty much hasn’t left the building since the sky fucking fell on her. Her job right now is keeping Jane fed and caffeinated and breaking down whatever numbers she can and reporting straight up to Fury whenever Jane has a more or less feasible idea.

Jane has taken up Tony’s workshop in addition to her own lab, recreating her stolen equipment. Darcy almost forgot just how badass Jane really is until she’s swinging around a mig welder with the careless disregard for safety equipment that is normally reserved for idiots and Tony himself. At least she’s wearing a helmet this time. Darcy waits for Jane to notice her for about fifteen minutes before the woman looks over. Darcy lifts the coffee mug (from the Keurig, not from down the street, because no one in the sciences is leaving the building right now) and Jane lays everything down, turns everything off, lifts up the helmet and smiles.

“How long have I been down here?” She asks as she walks over.

“Six hours, figured you could use a pick me up. Hungry?” Darcy holds out the cup.

“When did I last eat?” Jane takes the coffee and drinks approximately half in a single gulp.

“I had an assistant bring you a sandwich before you came down here. Did you eat that?”

Jane grimaces while thinking that far back, touching her stomach and shakes her head.

“Then breakfast when I had bagels brought in. I had a cheese one. You grabbed one at random while working on some equations.”

“Huh, I remember those equations.”

“That the replacement?”

“Stark doesn’t have the time, someone’s gotta do it. Don’t trust anyone else, and it’s a nice break.”

“Whatever, don’t need to justify. Welding’s sexy.” Darcy holds up her other hand, a tablet, which Jane also takes, presses a button and it shoots up as a 3D display a couple of counters over. Darcy fucking loves living in the future.

Jane sips at the remaining coffee while scrolling through the display, pulling around numbers and talking to JARVIS to change some parameters and watches a simulation of the forming bridge. It doesn’t go over like the one that happened, stopping before the ice formed, “That’s what I’m missing. The initial wormhole is actually the easy part. But when the artificial bridge tries to find the end point, it falls apart. It doesn’t work quite like the Einstein-Rosen, but something has to be grabbing it from the other side. I just can’t figure out what.”

“Like placing a call to a random payphone.” Jane looks at Darcy incredulously, “I remember payphones. We had a couple in high school for people that didn’t have cell phones. My friends and I would call the payphone number and make it ring, see who would pick it up.”

“That’s…Darcy, that’s….” Jane doesn’t actually finish her sentence, just starts redefining more parameters on the display, “There. Watch.” The simulation plays again, this time, the ice just begins to form before it falls apart. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you aren’t brilliant, Darcy.”

Darcy blinks, “Okay, I won’t.”

Jane’s already back into distracted scientist mode, and Darcy finds the sandwich from earlier and hands it to Jane who automatically eats it while directing new simulations, quickly eating before lowering the wielding hood, and heading back into the workshop proper.

                                                                                            *

It comes down to this: Jane isn’t fast enough. The other end picked up the ringing phone two weeks later, and Darcy watches on a monitor alongside Jane and the lab techs as the thread forms against a bright afternoon sky, waves and freezes across the horizon and stays. Jane presses her lips so close together that it looks like she’s trying to swallow them.

Hawkeye and Black Widow still aren’t back. A little (okay, a lot, and also some well placed puppy eyes) snooping shows they’ve missed their last two check-ins, wherever and whenever they were supposed to be. Darcy tries not to worry, but that’s mostly theoretical. It’s mostly theory that she’s taken to his room to sleep, because she, like everyone else, isn’t getting more than a few hours sleep. And she sleeps when Jane sleeps, which is on this side of never and on that side of forced. Sleep. Theoretical.

Thor has been coming and going, keeping SHIELD aware of the goings on elsewhere in the Nine Realms. There’s no movement from the Frost Giants, which is a blessing, but the trolls keep appearing, and Thor’s pretty sure (“Captain Rogers, I believe from the bottom of the well of knowledge…” the man does turn a phrase) that they are sneaking through the bridge.

Jane isn’t fast enough, and it’s only a matter of time before something worse than the trolls make their way to Midgard, or someone else figures out how to step onto the bridge.

“We obviously don’t need to worry about how the bridge is being made anymore,” Jane says, the shadows under her eyes aging her, but her voice is steel as she addresses the Shared Services lab personal, “Now, we have to figure out how to destroy it.”

 

Jane tries to split her time between equipment and theory, and ends up asleep against a whiteboard during the afternoon. Darcy isn’t quite sure how to move her without waking her, having never seen her sleep standing up before. Instructing JARVIS to make sure Jane’s woken up in a couple of hours (More would be better, but it’s not practical) she heads down to the Stark PR/Marketing offices.

“You said you have a degree in Mechanical Engineering?” Darcy says, grabbing a rolling chair and placing her feet on Carrie’s desk.

“Uh, yeah. It’s how I’m so brilliant.” Carrie startles at the feet, and removes her headphones and looks Darcy over, “Good Lord woman, you look terrible.”

“Can you follow a Stark-Foster engineering schematic?”

“That depends on how many hours Stark had been tinkering before he finally wrote them up.”

Which is how Carrie Messenger ends up in Tony’s workshop, insisting on some sort of coveralls because she is not going to get her clothes ruined, do you know how hard it is find clothing in her size, and steals a pair of Darcy’s boots, and spends two days rebuilding the consoles that were used to re-establish the Bifrost.

Tony comes in through the workshop in just his under suit on a forced rest after 36 hours fighting trolls (“There were these little blue ones…but they weren’t fighting against us, they were breaking into the bars…I think. That’s when Steve told me to sleep”) and he stops short at the sight of a strange woman working in his workshop, with Darcy working over a display screen a few feet away.

“Darcy, why is there a blonde inside of that…that?”

“Dimensional Relay Detection Array?”

“Yes, that. Why is there a blonde there?”

“Because Jane fell asleep at a whiteboard.” Darcy deadpans.

“I’m fairly certain she doesn’t have clearance to work on that.” Tony says, and it’s a testament to how exhausted he must be to be worrying about security clearance of all things, “I’m not sure if I should have clearance to work on that, and I made that. Does she know what it is?”

“Nope!” Carrie’s cheerful voice answers as she comes out of the Array, “But it’s awesome, that’s what it is. Can I get a little light from the directional, JARVIS? Ten percent should do it” JARVIS does not respond audibly, but a flex lighting structure just outside the console brightens and she grabs a different tool and goes headfirst into the machinery.

“I’m sorry Tony, I stole her from your PR department,” Darcy says with a shrug.

“Whatever, I’m going to pass out now.”

“Night boss!” says Carrie, waving her foot a little bit.

                                                                                   *

Thor returns a day later without any good news, but the news isn’t bad either. The creatures coming through the bridge are more along the lines of opportunity-seekers and not a coherent force, and not sent by the Frost Giants. But it does seem that they are aware of the bridge, but are being cautious, fearing it to be a trick.

“However,” he says, quieter than he’s been in the past, “I do believe this means that they will eventually want to follow the bridge back to Midgard. If it is AIM who has set up this false passage, it was not for means of an established alliance.”

Hulks been having too much fun fighting trolls, so neither him or Banner are at this meeting. Steve is, on his own forced break, Tony listening to the discussion over the comm. Darcy is amazed to be here at all, until she finds herself sketching out and writing notes in plain english for Fury and the agents as Jane and Tony talk over them.

“Why have we not attacked at the source of the bridge? Do we not know where it starts in this realm?”

“It’s too heavily fortified for us to get in. Needs a more gentle touch than any that we can provide at this time.” Steve answers, and does not look at Darcy. Darcy does look at Steve, though. He’s sweating still and ragged. Even his super abilities can’t keep up with two, almost three weeks of constant attacks, and tension as every person in the city looks to the Avengers to fix whatever the bridge brings and drops. It’s a tall order, and while the new reports show Captain America the good ole boy doing good, even he can’t run forever. Not with a third of his team just…gone.

Darcy is holding her heart against worry. Steve nearly takes that away from her, and she has to look away.

Jane gets the closest thing she has to a full nights rest that evening, before Thor goes back to Asgard to continue his investigations. Darcy doesn’t follow him out to say goodbye, because she’s crashed out in Clint’s bed after she realized that our of the 96 hours, maybe 12 have been sleep. She doesn’t even set an alarm. Her dreams are full of helicopters and hands running through her injured body and the sound of her own breathing.

When she wakes up, she finds that there is nothing for her. Jane’s so wrapped up in theory and moving her fingers and making JARVIS dance for her (what happened to the human touch, Jane, what happened?) that she doesn’t even acknowledge Darcy as the person who places a bagel in her hand and leaves orange juice and coffee next to her. Carrie’s long done with the consoles, and there are lab tech monitoring the output, so she isn’t needed there. There’s no one to help, no reports to make, and she’s all alone in the office space.

She can’t handle being all alone in the office. It’s too desolate; it’s too much like everyone’s abandoned her. It’s dangerous, and her inner voice says that it’s a really bad idea, but she heads first to the quartermaster to check out the service pistol and holster she’s entitled to, and then heads up to the roof.

Before the trolls came to visit, there was a small section of Manhattan that Darcy had kept tabs on every few days, watching the scaffolding rise and fall, building by building. The Hulk has hit it again. The rubble still lies in the street, no ones been able to attend to that particular site yet with the cleanup crews (carefully vetted by SHIELD, of course), and Darcy really wishes she were back in Virginia. No one attacks Virginia she thinks, but that’s not even true. She was stolen right out of Virginia.

They’ve managed to call in the War Machine, so there’s two armored suits flying and firing, and from a distance, they are almost delicate against the sky. She wonders who is on downtime right now, and figures it must be Banner, since she can’t hear his particular roar, but can see a street fight and at least one figure in blue. She watches the fighting as a meditation. The trolls are more exhausting than hard to fight, but exhaustion is deadly as well.

She’s lost enough in thought enough that she hears the door slamming before the chopper, “Darcy, I…” Jane yells, “Was someone coming in today?”

Darcy tears herself away from the fight and looks up to see a chopper coming towards the tower, “No, I don’t think so.” Darcy takes a few quick steps and pulls Jane down and over behind a utility box, and pulls out her gun. She knows there isn’t much she can do if the helicopter is hostile, but maybe she can get Jane back to safety, “If I tell you to run, run fast and low back downstairs.”

Jane’s head nods behind her back, and Darcy can feel her heart racing practically out of her chest. Taking a few deep breaths, she tries to remember her stance and everything she’s gleamed from watching Clint and other agents practice. Her hands are remarkably still when the helicopter lands, the engine is cut and the door is pulled open.

The red hair is unmistakable.

“Widow.” Jane says through clenched teeth, and Darcy tries not to jump up, because experience says you can’t trust appearances.

“Stay down,” she replies although a lump forms in her throat when she sees the second shadow. Black Widow looks out over the roof, scoping it out. Darcy knows her spot isn’t a good one, and she’s pretty visible. Widow’s gaze settles over her, but Darcy can’t make out the expression. Widow turns back to the door and the second shadow, outstretching her arms. The shadow becomes a person, and Darcy has to swallow down hard, because it’s Hawkeye, and he’s obviously using Widow for support to get to the ground. Widow leans in to say something into Hawkeye’s ear and he bursts out with a grin and a rough laugh.

He calls out, “That’s my girl.” And really, who can resist that. Darcy doesn’t drop the gun, but lowers it when she stands and runs over. She’s almost jumping up when she remembers that he needed help off the helicopter and that might be bad and maybe she should holster the gun. Clint watches in amusement as she does and then grabs her closer, lifts her up just a bit and puts his arms around her, runs his hands through her hair, “That’s my good girl. I’m so sorry Darcy.”

“What took you so god damn long, Barton?” She’s aiming for not hysterical and hopes she hasn’t stopped short.

“One-star prison cell. Not even a bucket.” He lets her down, and yeah, there’s a story there but he’s not ready to talk. He’s still business, “I see we’ve added to the skyline. It’s not a good look.”

“Watch out, it drips trolls.”

“Wait, trolls. Is that what they are all fighting out there?” Natasha asks, “We haven’t had mythological creatures in months.”

Jane’s made her way up to them, “It’s good to have you both back, because I have good news and bad news. Good news, I think we can destroy the bridge.”

“And the bad news?” Clint asks.

“Thor sent a messenger, the Frost Giants are gathering on their side, looks like just a small scouting party, but we don’t have much time.”

Darcy explains that they haven’t been able to get to the bridge by conventional means: both by skill set and by time management. “It’s an artificial bridge to Jotunheim, pretty obviously constructed by AIM via the stolen equipment and research materials. Until now, we’ve only gotten the trolls and a few other fairy creatures seeking out riches or I don’t know, better sports teams. But the Frost Giants would be totally a problem. A bigger one.”

“Dr Foster, what do you need us to do?” Natasha asks, her gaze intent on the slight scientist.

Jane rolls her shoulders back and expands herself to as tall as she can, “I need to be on the bridge.” Bravery doesn’t come easily to her friend, she knows, but it’s stubborn when it does come. Natasha and Jane lock eyes, and Jane looks pointedly at the helicopter.

Natasha relents, “We can get you up there.”

“Also, Darcy. That’s why I came up here.”

“What, no!” Clint says, “It’s not safe for you, much less…”

“We don’t have safety, Barton, we have resilience,” Darcy says looking up at Clint. There’s nothing but naked nerves in his gaze, but she doesn’t look away when she adds, “inept lab techs and agents?”

“Can’t teach them how to use the Array quick enough, even if we there was an agent to spare. I can use the tablets to interface with the other equipment in the tower, but the Array has to be on the bridge. I wouldn’t put Darcy in danger if I didn’t have to, Hawkeye. You need to believe that.”

His grip tightens, and his head drops just a fraction in defeat, “We have resilience and need. What do we have to work with? The bridge is solid right? It looks solid.”

“It doesn’t work the same way at the Bifrost does, which is good, because if it did, well,” she looks up and sees the Darcy with her ‘no physics, just move on’ glare of power and continues, “widespread destruction. The artificial bridge interfaces only with one other realm and the power requirements are much smaller. We just need to break the link and change the interface.”

“Will they be able to re-open it?”

“I haven’t gotten that far yet. I think I can change it so it can’t be remade, but it’s not like I can test it outside of simulation right now. It’ll be chilly, grab a jacket.

“And boots, it’s made of ice after all.” Darcy adds.

“Have you informed anyone else in SHIELD of this plan?” Natasha asks, curiosity permeating her tone, “You came straight up here, didn’t you?”

Jane tilts her head up and knits her brow, “Darcy is who I always go to first.” She switches her gaze, ”Did Carrie add in…?”

“Yeah, she worked in a lighter material. And wheels, so now we don’t have to carry it. Unless the wheels break.” Darcy leans in and gives Clint a kiss on the cheek, a promise for later, reassurance for now, “Meet back in twenty?”

 

It doesn’t take Darcy twenty, and it almost seems like Clint didn’t take any, except she can see the comm pressed into his ear and a fresh set of arrows in his quiver next to him in the pilot seat. He’s running through a preflight checklist. Jane’s already brought the Array up to the roof and loaded it into the chopper. It’ll probably be the most protected thing in the air ever. Jane may not have built all of it, but it’s her baby all the same.

“When did you learn to fly?” she asks, stepping up into the helicopter.

“Needed it for a mission about 5 years ago. Before that I was usually hanging halfway out.” Clint responds, not looking up.

“That seems rather dangerous.”  He snorts back, “You do a lot of things that are dangerous,” she says pointedly, “I just spent the last couple of weeks just hoping you’d be back.”

“It’s different, though. I know going out where my limits are, what I can do. I may just be a guy with a bow, but…”

“I don’t know my limits yet, sweetheart. I do know that they lie farther out than what I’m doing right now. I don’t have crazy nothing anymore, but I’m scared out of my wits for the same reason. It’d be so easy to run back to Mom, let her find me a nice, safe job in a law firm and play dress up. But I don’t think that’s in my cards anymore. I got to fight.”

“It shouldn’t be your fight. I don’t like risking Jane, either. Never liked risking any civilian.”

“Gave that up when I signed my contract.” Clint looks defeated, “What’s going on right now are feelings, Clint. You have them. About me. Which is frankly adorable and awesome. So we are going to save the world, because that’s our job. You keep me as safe as can be while we break down the bridge.” She moves into his personal space and settles into his lap. He kisses the top of her head, moves his arms so she’s balanced, and then tilts her head to meet his own, resting their foreheads together.

“Oh sweetheart, awesome is too small a word. It’s really good to see you.” His lips reach out to hers and while it starts out sweet, it’s been weeks and they both get a little enthusiastic about catching up. His fingers reach under her coat and sweater for bare skin at her hips, and they press in for a better grip.

“Ah, I see Barton is getting you acquainted with his…love affair for the helicopter.”

“Fuck off ‘Tasha.”

“Not tonight, dear, we have work to do.”

Clint looks nervously at Darcy, as if the reminder that he and Natasha have an “It’s Complicated” status written all over them should bother her, but Darcy knows better, so she laughs, “Put a cork in that, hotshot, and we can explore that later.” She removes herself from his lap, and motions Natasha to take the unused seat next to the archer. Jane enters behind Natasha, taking a seat next to the Array, and pulls out the tablet and starts working. Darcy moves back to sit next to her.

Clint and Natasha finish the pre-flight.

“Did you ever tell Hill or Director Fury what we were doing?” Darcy asks Jane quietly.

“No, think I should?”

“Nah, best to beg forgiveness and all that shit.” Darcy shrugs and calls up, “We’re ready whenever you are.”

Hawkeye’s, “Yes ma’am!” is almost lost as the engine starts, and the final checks are done and they leave the roof, and the bridge looms ever closer.

 

Jane starts giving instructions to Darcy during the short trip. It’s similar enough to what she had to monitor before that she can see why Jane insisted that she be the one to come along, but different enough that she has to pay attention. This time, she’s not just monitoring, she’s controlling the emission of specific particle and energy signatures, while Jane is controlling a different set. “If you really want to get down to it, I need you to break the Earth side, I’m working on the other side, while making sure that the Bifrost isn’t touched.”

“See Jane, you really are learning how to speak human.” Darcy drums her fingers against the seat. Natasha hands over two sets of comms, already tuned to the Avengers channel, thankfully not on VOX. She keeps one for herself, gives the other to Jane and they put them on.

“—- That the helicopter is one of ours?” Tony is saying.

“I’m sorry, did you miss us and our thrilling heroics?” Clint says.

“Hawkeye?  Whatever, story time later. What are you doing?”

“Showing a couple of girls a good time, Iron Man. I thought you knew what that looked like.” He snarks as he touches down on the bridge.

“Stand back, we’re going to try some science!” Jane’s voice is a twist of nerves and steel, but she can’t hide her humor.

“Iron Man, War Machine, keep your eyes out and provide cover if needed.” Captain America orders, “Be careful, Jane. Come back with something to tell Thor.”

During the exchange, Natasha has exited the helicopter, and is signaling for Jane and Darcy to follow. They make quick work of unstrapping the Array as Hawkeye comes out of the pilots seat.

“We aren’t going to have much time before AIM figures out that we are trying to do a great injustice to them. How long will setup take?”

“I initialized the Array before we left, my tablet is ready. I need to find the right spot to set up, but then, I don’t know. A few minutes, ten? Depends on how everything reacts.” The Array is light enough to lift and Jane hands it over to Widow, who places it on the ground. “The hard part is going to be finding the vantage point I need.” Jane steps down out of the helicopter, Darcy behind her, Hawkeye behind them, bow at the ready. He takes a moment to place his hand at the small of Darcy’s back as they get their bearings on bridge. It’s icy, but not as slippery as Darcy feared, she leans into the touch for just a moment, taking the comfort and reminder that he’s there with her. Jane is already moving ahead, her tablet out and Darcy follows, pulling the behind her. It might be light, but she’s not going to carry it. Widow goes with them; Hawkeye lags behind to watch from the AIM side.

The bridge begins from a tall, but non-descript office building. Darcy isn’t sure where they are, but the bridge continues in a gradual incline. Jane had said at one point that it should become a more stable wormhole at some point before it leaves the atmosphere. They don’t, thankfully have to get that far up. Jane stops after a minute of walking, “Okay. I can work with the readings here. Darcy.” They work together to get the Array in a useable position. This console is a little smaller, Darcy has to bend over more to watch it, and she’s considering kneeling.

“Company!” Hawkeye shouts to them. Darcy whips her head around and sees a small group of yellow-jacketed thugs step out of the office building and onto the bridge. They manage to run at a fairly impressive speed, and Hawkeye starts letting loose arrows. Two hit and drop the men.

Jane tells her they need to start, and starts pressing buttons on the tablet and a moment later, the readouts on the Array begin and Darcy gets too busy keeping one set of variables in a range, and releasing a second set at a controlled pace. It’s constant, attention saturated work, and whatever Jane is doing involves flipping between screens on her tablet at a rapid rate. It’s not a surprise when she starts hearing bullets and a few fly over her head. The yellow parka’d men, and seriously, they have hats to match and they look like the strangest Man in the Yellow Hat beekeepers ever, has gained reinforcements.

“Two minutes at this range!” Jane is struggling to keep her breathing constant. Widow is providing cover fire for them while Hawkeye picks off the beekeepers. It’s getting harder to keep the range consistent now, and Darcy’s brain hasn’t worked this much in ages. The two minutes pass by slowly, and both Jane and Darcy have crouched down as much as possible.

“Two minute mark! What’s next, Jane?” Darcy says, still working the console.

“Stop keeping them balanced. Increase the rate that the Array is releasing by twenty-five percent, I’m adjusting on the Jotunheim side with the second set of variables. If I’m right, the bridge should start to weaken.”

Darcy looks around. They are pretty high off the ground, after all, above even most of the skyscrapers, “Weaken? How does the bridge come down?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s why we have the helicopter, right?”

So of course that’s when the helicopter is blown up. The force of the explosion makes all three women fall, and a few of the AIM goons have made their way past Hawkeye, and Widow is desperately trying to keep them at bay. Darcy works at her console, increasing the release rate with one hand, pulling out her gun in the other. The bridge starts to feel decidedly less solid beneath them.

“Increase again, another ten percent.” Jane orders, “We’ve almost got it. Another couple of minutes and the bridge will go down” the "with us on it", doesn’t really need to be said. “You’re done Darcy. Thank you.” She says sadly and Darcy doesn’t even have to look to her to know that bravery has been overruled by dread right now.

Natasha is yelling into her comm, Hawkeye is falling back to their position past the burning wreck of the chopper. “We have to get out of here!” he says, letting off an arrow, one of the cool ones that explodes and takes out half the remaining men.

“Can we get to the building?” Darcy says, “Get down that way?”

“Do you want to fight your way through an entire office of armed men?” Hawkeye responds, “Iron Man, War Machine…” he starts as the ice starts to crack underneath them, “We could really use a deus ex machina rescue right now.”

The two suits burst up into the sky towards them, but they aren’t exactly close. The remaining attackers are pressing forward, as the edges of the bridge are melting faster that they can get back to the building. Darcy joins Widow and Hawkeye and starts shooting. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t hit anyone, but it doesn’t matter. Jane is still working, and Jane need to be protected.

“It’s done, oh god.” Jane says, terror raking her body and her finger shake. She drops her tablet just as a large separation forms at the edge of her feet, bridge material falling down over the city. In her attempt to move away she slips and slides on the ice falling on her back, her legs past her thighs over the crumbling edge. She using whatever leverage she still has to keep herself from sliding further over.

“You know, I really like it when you call me a god, Hawkeye, but I think Thor would get jealous.” Iron Man says as he soars up through the crack, picking Jane up by her feet with one outstretched arm. He switches directions and swoops down, grabbing Darcy, sweeping her up with the other, and it’s hard to breath. The bridge gives way where Jane had landed, and Hawkeye and Widow are stepping forward through their fighting with the beekeepers, trying to buy themselves time.

The last thing she can clearly see as the ice cracks furthers, and pieces are falling all at once is War Machine dodging chunks of bridge. She closes her eyes and trusts that he’s good at catching.

“Rhodey has always been there before, ladies. Trust that he will be there now,” Stark says, depositing them back on the roof of the Tower. “I’ve got to get back to Helm’s Deep.” He points back to the streets below before taking off.

Jane isn’t going to move anytime soon, adrenaline rolling off of her in waves, and Darcy’s feeling much the same way. They hold on to each other’s arms, grounding each other, and watch as remnants of the bridge thin and collapse in drips. She doesn’t have her tablet anymore, but at the very least, this bridge is toast and now AIM knows they can thwart the creation of another one.

“Need a little down there, Captain?” she hears the com go off and it only takes a second to register the voice as Clint’s, and she releases her breathe audibly. “War Machine, drop me off on that building, it’s a good spot.”

“Put me down by the Captain.” Widow says.

“Our work’s done.” Jane says, “They’ve still got a few more to clean up, I guess.”

“It’s always work with them. They need to learn to relax. Let life pass them by sometimes.” The women look at each other and don’t bother to hold back the laughter. “Coffee?” Jane makes a face, “Vodka?” Darcy suggests instead. Jane nods.

Darcy takes one last look at the ground fighting, but smiles. World’s pretty much saved again, her boyfriend is back, and Jane is awesome when she gets drunk. Everything else can just fall where it will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I really just have a thing for Darcy and Jane being awesome together. Also, for protective but rational, practical Clint.


	7. Chapter 7

The ceiling is awfully boring today, Darcy thinks, staring straight up. Her phone is on speaker but she’s not really paying that much attention to it as the tinny indignant voice talks on and on. Darcy gives an occasional murmur and various vocalizations, as she sits up and scrolls through her dashboard again.

Whoever was able to get those photos of them on the bridge was amazing. And thankfully they were using their photography superpowers for good instead of evil. These were not paparazzi photos; these were front page exclusives of all the action. Darcy and Jane aren’t entirely recognizable in the photos but named nonetheless. Four people, three of them women, up against a squad of goons, a fiery helicopter, on a bridge high above the city? If Darcy didn’t know herself better, she’d say badass. You do what you gots though.

…Which lead to Darcy’s current problem. Good photos, with clear names have a way of making themselves disseminate throughout the world. Clint comes in from the shower, just a towel - one of her favorite ensembles, looks at the phone and starts to say something but Darcy cuts him off with a hurried finger to her lips. He slips behind her, wrapping both his arms around her, and then for good measure, traps her legs underneath his. Darcy gives him what she thinks is a soft slap, but it must be louder than she thinks because….

“DARCY, what is going on by you?” her mom yells over the phone line. Darcy grabs the phone and takes it off of speaker, throwing off Clint’s arms and standing up to pace the room. He’s struggling to hide his laughter.

“No, no mom, it’s alright. I swear. It’s just Clint, he’s being an ass again.” She sticks her tongue out at him in a quick pause, “Yes mom. I saw the pictures. Yes. Yes…no mom, it was cold. I’m being careful, don’t you like it when I’m careful? Yes. Mom, mom, I told you; I went on a road trip after graduation. I forgot to tell you and then with the whole….thing. Yes, I’m as safe as I can be. I live in a tower with superheroes. Really, what could be safer?”

Clint’s laughter is audible now, and he grabs for Darcy again, “I showed you the pictures of my place mom. Yes, I know that I could rent a three bedroom for real cheap at home, but I have a job here, and Jane needs me. You remember Jane, right?…Yes, that rather skinny girl on the bridge with.... No she didn’t make me go out there with her. No trust me, he didn’t make me either.” Darcy lifts the phone from her ears and runs her hands over her eyes. Clint pulls her back on the bed again, lightly covering her mouth so she doesn’t squeal, letting go only when he’s got her good and trapped with him. And naked. And that was a distraction….

“Wait, what was that? NO. No mom, you don’t need to come out here. I’ll visit next month when my vacation time renews. I know, I know you’ve never been to New York. But no…no, I don’t have anywhere for you to stay. Can’t have guests. Security concern,” she lies. She’s a lying liar. But it’s her mother, so that’s to be expected,” ….yes? I’m sure you could, but no mom, I already said...no, he wouldn’t. No you can’t….because there’s reasons? It’s dangerous? No, it’s not dangerous for me, I’m trained…” Clint laughs in her ear, low and dirty. “Trained to deal with problems. I can’t if I’m worried. Yes, mother. I know mom. I don’t really have any choice, do I?” she sighs, “Yes, I will. Yes. Love you too mom.” She hits the screen to end the call, and stares at the phone for a second before dropping it on the floor.

Clint’s grip relaxes, and she turns herself around and up, straddling him, pushing a finger into his chest. “This is your fault.” He answers by pulling her down and kissing her until she’s red in the face, but she’s not going to let him get away so easily, “That is why it is your fault. You with the hot and the distraction.” She says, hovering her face over his, and can’t help it, drops a kiss into his neck.

“What’s my fault?”

“My mother. The one I was trying to keep you away from for as long as possible? That was her just browbeating me into letting her visit me. Because you distracted me. Distracter.”

Clint goes still for a moment, hands stopped on her hips, “I wonder if I can get out of the country when this happens.”

“Oh no, bucko, you got me into this. You are seeing it through. I can pull strings, I have strings to pull, and I’ll get you on leave. Barring the end of the world, which admiringly happens far too often, you will be here.”

“Darcy, I haven’t met the family of anyone I’ve dated since,” he pauses, honestly trying to think it out, “I don’t know if I’ve ever met family before.”

“Another article in your back catalog of issues is your truly pathetic dating history.” She leans down, rests her hands along his cheeks, freshly shaved and smooth, “You’ll be okay, sweetheart. You are a good man, and she’ll like you. After she wrings you out about putting her precious little girl in danger.”

“You are perfectly capable of getting into danger all by yourself.” Clint points out helpfully, “Darcy Lewis lives life on the edge.”

“Darcy Lewis prefers living on the edge in her cubicle.” Clint’s arms move until he’s got a firm grip around her, and it’s been long enough that she knows that particular look, “As long as I’ve got you, I’m always going to be living on the edge aren’t I?”

 

Clint answers by flipping her over, which makes her shriek and laugh, and reflects as his rough hands move the fabric of her shirt over head, that safety and surety are wonderful things, but that this may as well be a very close runner up. If this is her life now, so be it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Darcy's mother makes Darcy make sense. Trust me.
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you everyone who has read this all the way through. The Coming Storm is Going to be a Crazy Ride has been an incredible experience from first envisioning it to posting this last part. The response has been tremendous for whats really my first fanfic in a decade. 
> 
> This was meant to be a much different story, darker and depressing. But Darcy wouldn't let that happen, and this is the result. Instead of story about falling apart it because a story about the changing face of safety and security, and becoming someone who takes action instead of letting things happen to her.
> 
> Really, thank you for reading. It's been fantastic and inspiring as a writer.


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